Artemis Fowl: The De Danann Protector
by holikimaela
Summary: When the People's oldest enemy returns to haunt them, who can they ask to help them but their newest one? PostEC, preTODLC. Eventual ArtemisHolly.
1. Prolouge

**Prologue**

The Queen of the Tuatha Dé Danann was now both predator and prey.

Her breath was heavy with rage and fear. The drive to keep ahead and also to gain ground sustained her when her heart did not. Even as her muscles seized her and her mind froze with indecision, she kept chasing, kept running.

She hunted her human lover. Her People hunted her.

They hunted her like the bird whose form she took – a raven, a crow. Those below her shot arrows she herself had crafted. They could not know it was her – they would take aim at any blackbird over the battlefield – but the thought that men whom she had once lead in glory would attack her in shame pierced her more mortally than any arrow.

She had not always been such a disgrace – once she had been a warrior, a woman. She had been the highest of the high, he less than a fae slave. But, was it not the slave who is so well placed to put the knife in his master's heart? And her own People … they had encouraged her to seduce him. The humans had been slow to act at first, and the Council had tried to gain their alliance. But humans adapted quickly … that was what she had always thought … yet it hadn't occurred to her …

She came across him.

Under the moon, blackened by the souls of the dead, he lay dying. There was nothing beautiful about him now – cursed by her own magic, he rotted as a corpse while he lived. She shifted shape, and armed herself from his own belt. His lifeless eyes flickered in neither malice nor guilt but surprise – he had not known it was her. Morgiana did not know whether to use the knife in her hand to cut away his decaying skin or make a new wound.

She still loved him.

She laid the blade flat on his neck, slipping it under his necklace. Turning it so the edge balanced on his skin, she pulled the knife back on herself until the chain snapped and the Stone attached fell free. She took it up, and in the same hand, unclasped her own necklace and Stone.

For all they looked, the jewels might have been lovers' trinkets. Morgiana had certainly treated them as such – gifting one to her human lover and keeping her own around her neck always, not because of it's power, but largely because it had been her link to him.

Although the Omnipresent allowed the wearer to cross vast distances in a heartbeat, no one had suspected him. He was human – surely he did not have the expertise needed to manipulate on of the archaic Stones? Morgiana had taught him petty sorcery, but never talisman magic. _She_ hardly had the magery to be able to control the immense power required to focus the Stones …

But he had Betrayed them. He had spoken with the Fomorian Warlord moments before the attack on the People's stronghold. Xaen – a fortress guarded by seven armies, each seven legions strong – had been stormed at midnight under a full moon. Insanity, for this was when the fairies had their fullest power. Genius, for Xaen in truth was a bluff – a trick, an illusion.

La Xaen's defeat, their slaughter, had meant the same for all the People. Without La Xaen's presence, the south was invaded and the north under threat from their own lands. And all the while, as People cried and died, her own lover had orchestrated their mourning music.

He then Betrayed not only her People but the whole of the Earth.

Morgiana held in her hand two of three Stones – the Omnipresent and the Omnifarious. One more existed. The Omniscient. Once, it had been hers. Then, her lover's. Now, the Fomorian Warlord held it in his claw.

But nevertheless, it had once been in her hands – she could end this.

Morgiana transformed her Sight, and immediately the Spirit Realm descended in a supernatural fog over the mortal one.

The Omnipresent had given her the knowledge to bring it to existence. The Omnifarious gave her the power to change it. The Omnipresent would, very soon, allow her to ascend to it.

She bent her head and pressed her lips to his, as she pressed the Stone into his palm. Both gave their last mortal breath as a gasp.

-

Death would have been a release.

-

The Stone were each in the hands of a different People.

The Powers That Were had been balanced.

Morgiana drained almost all the Power from all the Stones, into one.

The Dé Danann Protector.

To protect the world from this ever occurring again.

-

The Fomorians, devoid of sorcery, were defeated by the fairies' inherent magic.

But as this magic waned, without the protection of the Stones, they were also defeated.

Humans ruled the surface, and the fairies named it Betrayal.

-

Morgiana watched as what remained of the Fae Folk built a city. They named it Haven. She watched as they wrote a Book which – among many laws – decreed that no fairy was to love a human. She watched human memories of the fairies grow into fanciful myths. She watched as her own People's memories grew into ones that were just as delusive.

But it was not enough.

If another was destine to Morgiana's fate, they would also be drawn into the Protector by the very nature of its creation.

If a fairy and human were to fall in love, to bring the Stones together, to kiss while one of them lay dying … they would open the void inside the Protector into which the destructive power of the Stones was contained. All the past would return. History would be repeated and begin a war not only to end all wars, but life itself.

Morgiana used the power of the Stones to search the future for ones with such a fate. In the many threads of lives and deaths, she came close to entangling herself like a youngling spider in its first web.

For a long time she searched and segued. For a long time, she watched and waited. For a long time, she influenced and interfered.

Then, on the first day of Spring, the catalyst occurred.

_I can do nothing more, _Morgiana thought_. Perhaps I will not have to intervene._

But she already had.

And she knew better than to doubt destiny.

* * *

A/N: Thank you for taking the time to read this! Reviews are welcomed, of course. If you do, tell me what you think of Morgiana -- I quite like her as a character, I wish I could have written more of her. Unfortunately, you won't get to see her again until the end. Yes, this is fully-written! Happy Easter! 


	2. Search and Recover

**Chapter** **One**;  
Search and Recover

-

Holly twirled around in Foaly's misshapen chair, her legs stuck out from her like the blades of a ceiling fan, trying to produce an artificial breeze. Despite her efforts, the air still hung heavily around her, beading sweat onto her forehead. Resisting the urge to procrastinate her paper work in favour of an icy nutri-shake, Holly tried to remember why exactly she'd trekked down the hallway with a towering stack of files _just_ to sit in the Ops Booth with Foaly. It came to her just as the air-conditioner whirred back into life.

_Damn heat…_Holly grumbled silently, arching her back. _Stupid chair._

After scratching her signature onto the last incident report, Holly tried to slump back into Foaly's chair. Tried, that is, because, when she leant into the backrest, something began digging into her spine. Sitting up straight, Holly reached behind her to find the source of the annoyance. Her fingers found a nub of plastic.

'Nice to see my posture correctors are doing their job,' remarked Foaly from the monitor station. He didn't glance at her, just stared straight ahead. _Most likely his eyes haven't left that monitor all day_, thought Holly. _Workaholic pony and his stupid chairs._

She let her gaze wander over the map on the screen. It took her a moment for her to realise what she was seeing. Intrigued, she pushed a pile of mission statements sideways and stood to get a better look.

The map denoted six dots with eight or more concentric circles radiating out from the centre. Earthquake epicentres. She checked the dates; each had been in the last six weeks.

'Does this have anything to do with that quake in Atlantis on Friday?'

Foaly actually turned to look her in the eye. 'Yes, and one in Tara, and the ones in Len Fâit, Hadrian, and the two in Atlantis…'

Holly leaned over his arm rest, tracing a finger over each of the locations. 'Do you think–'

A light flashed on the desk beside her, interrupting the query. It belonged to an elaborate looking series of buttons and levers that Holly daren't have touched. She watched it for a moment, wondering idly if it would go away, or if Foaly would answer it. (_Anything to get away from paper work, _her mind chided.) It didn't go away. It seemed to her that the flashing became more insistent.

'Foaly?' She waited for a response. 'Foaly!'

He looked up from the calculations on the bottom of the screen, and followed her line of sight. 'Hit the blue button.'

Holly squinted at the panel. '_Which_ blue button?'

'On the left.'

She pressed it down. Another panel emerged from the only clear space on the desk. Holly scowled pointedly at Foaly.

'My left, that is.'

Pressing down the proper button, Holly decided she might just go back to her office - air conditioning or no air conditioning.

Something beeped, and the monitor above Foaly's screen flickered into life. A rush of static filled the screen for a moment. Holly smirked. Even _she_ could navigate the communications software better than whoever was trying to establish this line.

As the blur of grey settled into Root's face, Holly rearranged her own into an expression of neutrality – despite the interference, resolution was clear enough that she could see the red tinge to her commander's cheeks quite clearly. She elbowed Foaly in the ribs, coughing gently.

Foaly spun his chair to face Root, a smile tucked into the corners of his face. 'Julius! What a welcome surprise! Calling again on the technological genie of Haven?' Obviously the centaur had no respect for an elf in a bad mood. 'Hang on while I get you onto an integral line – who established this link? It's hor-ren-dous.'

Commander Root reddened further. 'Get back in your bottle, _genie, _before I shove it down your throat. And don't call me Julius.'

'Charmed.' Foaly beamed, lacing his fingers in front of him. 'So, what dilemma do you need my unrivalled expertise for now?'

'Not you, you egotistical mule.' Root's complexion dulled ever so slightly. Holly wondered what he had over Foaly; nothing cooled the Commander like having the upper-hand. 'Someone told me Holly was in here.'

'Right here, sir.' She silenced Foaly's forthcoming remark about her sudden obedience with a glare. Her uncleared flight to Tara had given her some grief over the past couple of weeks – more than the paper work even.

'Good. You're going top-side.'

Her mind raced. Her office time had only just started…why would he give her active duty? Holly's mouth dropped a fraction. 'He hasn't…has he?'

'No. This isn't about that Mud-boy, thank Frond. It's about this.'

The box displaying Root's face minimised to a tiny square on the screen. In the space vacated, another map flashed onto the screen. A misshapen blue-green splotch marred most of the landscape. Holly raised one eyebrow.

'That's a power-chart.'

Power-charts recorded any surges of fairy magic in any given area. They were used to track ley lines and magic hotspots. She wondered why this one was so important – it wasn't even very clear. It looked like someone had spilt radio-active coffee over a map of Europe. She could barely make out the shape of Ireland from behind the stain of green.

Her mind jerked as her sense caught up with her. Upon which, she stared blankly at the map. Only something incredibly powerful could have generated that much energy. Ley lines, the most magical sites of the modern era, didn't even show up as anything more than an aqua shadow! But _this_ signature – what ever it was – was so large that it had coloured half of Europe. And _that _was impossible.

'I suppose you want an iris cam then?' Foaly's voice contained just a hint of wonder.

'Didn't it cross your tiny, equine mind I might want to _record_ this?' Root's tone dripped with sarcasm, to the point that Holly considered recommending bottling the refuse to sell on the trade-markets.

Foaly leaned back in his chair – Holly noticed his didn't have a posture corrector – at ease again, despite some awe lingering in his eyes. 'I knew you would need _something _from my treasure trove.'

'Shut up pony.' The screen went black.

-

A few hours found Holly hovering, shielded, over what the techies had judged to be the source of the energy source – a fairy port of ancient origins. In the old days, when fairies still lived on the surface, this spot had been a centre of religion and commerce. The People's answer to Rome. Of course, that was millennia ago. The face of the cove had changed since then.

The sea had long since eroded much of the settlement itself. The temple of the ocean sprite Nika (for who the city was named) no longer stood on the shore, and many of the buildings that had once been beside it were now submerged under the sea. A landslide had buried most evidence of life – it had been nothing like the cataclysmic sinking of Râet, but still spectacular in its own right.

Long fingers of land sliced green into the toiling black of the sea, ending abruptly into sheer cliffs. Cave systems riddled their innards, turning the mini-peninsulas into mazes that were reminiscent of an ant-nest. The whole thing was probably on the verge of collapse.

Holly tried hard not to think of that as she landed. Instead, she occupied her mind with exactly how she was going to track down this power source, or what ever else was flooding ley lines across the Emerald Isle and into the mainland.

Energy sensors were no good – Holly had worked that out on her own. The energy source was so powerful that it blacked them out all together. So, it was up to her to use the old method. Sniff and search, Root had called it. The hound dog method.

Holly reached inside herself for her magic sight. That was simple enough – they'd learnt how to access it during Cadet training. It was one of those useless skills made redundant by technology, and was now taught almost only for traditional value. Once in a while, however, one of those 'useless skills' would come in handy when technology proved itself to be as temperamental as the centaur that created it. Like right now.

Very suddenly, she found it. She knew she'd found it courtesy of a jolt to the base of her skull. She couldn't feel anything for a while, except a prickling sensation. Slowly, she began to feel as if something bright was crackling just out of her peripheral vision. The sensation was roughly akin to the feeling one would get while facing forward and then having someone come up and stand directly behind you. You couldn't see them, but you could feel them there. This was the same sort of thing.

Holly fired up her wings again, trying to keep a grip on the direction of the 'feeling'. She hovered for a moment before inching forward. The sensation spun wildly, before settling in a different position.

_There's a reason that technology made this sort of thing obsolete, _thought Holly, pulling her fingers into a fist.

She moved cautiously toward this new location. When the sense didn't waver, she motored forward more boldly. It thrashed about like a rowboat in a hurricane, but eventually settled back into the same position.

Holly pointed her gaze at the source of the feeling. It seemed to be radiating from a space a few clicks to her left, and downward. _Quite possibly in those caves, _speculated Holly. _Typical. _

She pulsed the motor on the wing-set, until she was suspended above the water. She regarded the caves with reserved suspicion. They gaped at her from the dull rock face, dark eyes peering from a block of grey stone. There had to be at least fifteen, scattered unbiasedly on all heights all the way around the cliff face. Which was the one she needed?

She tried not to analyse it. Instinct was called for, not genius. Still, it was difficult to trust the fate of her search to something she had precisely no control over. Holly considered playing 'red stone, blue stone, yellow stone, shine' (the fairy version of enee-meanie-minee-moe) to decide, but dismissed it. It had never worked for her as a child and it had no reason to now.

Picking one cave at random, Holly manoeuvred the wings until she could drop unobstructed down onto the ledge jutting out from the cave opening. The sense was stronger here. It didn't automatically mean she'd chosen the right cave (it could have been the one to the left or right of this one, for all she knew), but at least it meant she was close. She could hazard her way through the maze of tunnels if she had to. If the tide didn't rise up and drown her before she got that far.

The cave itself was dark and gloomy, much like a cave should be. Glow worms hung off the ceiling, and rocks littered the floor. Further inside, it looked as if the cave narrowed into a passage – too small for a human, but probably fine for a fairy.

She headed towards it. As she ducked through the passage, she began to feel slightly clammy, and tight around the stomach. Holly clamped her imagination firmly with a mental block. She wasn't claustrophobic, and she wasn't going to fool herself into thinking that she was.

The feeling had just began to lessen when a blast of air whistled down the passage with the tormented sound Holly could only describe as from a wraith of death. It carried with it a stench so over-powering that Holly would have turned around had she been able to, but – although the passage was high enough – the added bulk of her wings made it nearly impossible to turn. Nor was there enough room to loosen the straps to remove them.

As she continued, the space tightened until she could barely fit through. In her pocket, her LEP radio buzzed. She pressed it up against the rock face, hoping to hit the right button.

'Recalling all personnel, all LEP personnel return to base imme–'

It cut out of range.

Grumbling, Holly edged her way forward, wishing she'd picked another cave. She covered her mouth and nose with her tunic, gulping in deep breaths of air. She tried not to think of the smell as she did so – it was as if something had been left to rot away in the blackness, as if the dark might mask it. Next time she'd listen when her stomach tried to tell her something. Maybe she _had _been better of with the nursery rhyme.

The passage widening now, but the smell didn't vanish. It was stronger than ever, even when she emerged into the cavernous space at the end of the passage. She looked around in the semi-darkness. It seemed as if the whole centre of the room had been raised into a platform. She wondered what kind of water erosion had caused such an unnatural looking structure.

Climbing up to get a closer look, Holly was reminded about the time limit on her mission. It was hard to find purchase on the smooth surface, which told her that a large amount of water would have had to gushed up here with some force. The fact that the cave wasn't flooded gave proof to her guess that the slope drained it back out again at low tide. Holly increased her pace; she didn't particularity want to hang around this particular cave, what with its ghostly wind and over-powering odour.

She ran her fingers across the ledge and over onto the flat, dusky stone. The incline ended with a sharp bevel, which made her wonder if maybe this place wasn't entirely carved from nature after all. Unless the water was enchanted, it was unlikely that it could have made such a distinct edge.

Occupied with her musings, Holly didn't notice the mound lying in front of her until a moment before she tripped over it. She flung her arms out to stop her fall, but it came anyway, sending her forward onto the cold stone. Her arms collapsed beneath her, forcing her head to impact painfully with the ground. Without thinking, Holly took a gasping breath, only to choke again on the fetid air. The world swam for a moment – from the knock to her head or the odour, she couldn't tell – but quickly regained focus.

It was then Holly realised she was lying eye to eye with a decaying skull.

-

Artemis stared intently at the television in front of him. A woman in a pinstripe suit dictated news of an earthquake in east Ireland. At that moment, however, Artemis wasn't interested in what she had to say. Something had caught his eye on the scrolling bar on the bottom edge of the screen.

_Diamond relic found with remains of Egyptian guard._

His phone beeped, interrupting his thoughts. He felt blindly for it on the oak coffee table, his eyes never leaving the screen. Flipping the lid open, he made a perfunctory check of the number on screen. Butler, of course.

He held it to his ear. 'Hello?'

'Master Artemis, I have received another message from the man in Paris. He says that "the ice is in the freezer."' Artemis tapped his fingers on the phone impatiently. 'Does that make sense?'

'Perfect sense, Butler.' Artemis didn't want to hear about his diamond trade at the moment. His hand moved to the perspex container in his pocket. Exposed to the light, the metallic lens inside reflected a silver-white circle onto the ceiling. 'What about the man from Limerick? Did you question him?'

'Yes. He won't be bothering us again.' Another pause. Artemis gritted his teeth. 'Are you sure that was necessary, sir? He was a good contact – he wouldn't have lied to us … to you.'

'When did I give you leave to second-guess my orders?' Artemis gave a pause himself. 'I did not order those lenes.' _I would not have forgotten._

Without waiting for an answer, he snapped the cover shut. Dropping the container on the table with his phone, Artemis lifted one hand to massage his temples. He shouldn't have to explain himself to his manservant. When his muscles had relaxed, he opened his eyes to regard the newsreader.

'This just in,' she said, her dull eyes alight with a sparkle for just a second. 'The diamond relic found in the apparently empty Egyptian pyramid has been bought for half a million pounds by a private collector.'

A tirade of images flashed onto the screen, all showing the diamond at various angles and proximities. Artemis appraised the stone with a professional interest. Quite good quality – excellent cut, no cloud. A little large for a diamond, which might mean fraud. A tiny catch, suitable for a chain to be threaded, crowned the gem's crest. It would take some expertise – and as such, money – to remove. It possessed a shade of pink to it. Argyle?

Despite the fact his observation was entirely unemotional, something about it seemed to draw Artemis in. Whether it was the reddish sheen that just caught the light, or the details in the planes and edges, or something else entirely, he couldn't be sure. Still, it was a feasible investment. Even if it wasn't a true diamond, being found in a tombless pyramid should add to the value for museum investors. People, he had come to realise, like mysteries.

When the piece was finished, the newswoman looked straight into the camera, her smile glinting with the sparkle of whitened teeth.

'These pictures were found in the cave where the explorers found the diamond – along with the corpse of the Egyptian guard who is possibly a pygmy.'

The first shot was nothing much of consequence; it depicted the decaying corpse of a man clearly not of Egyptian origin – the shoulder blades were too wide. And the cranium structure was all wrong. Artemis considered calling the archaeologist involved to inform him of his mistake, but the next frame shattered that impulse.

Artemis froze the screen. His eyes widened ever so slightly, and he sat forward, hands clutching at the Italian leather on the lounge chair. The shot was a sketch made with a primitive form of clay – but it was not the medium it was drawn in that concerned Artemis, but the subject.

It was a layered drawing. The first level depicted crude representations of mountains – acute and baseless triangles making a series of peaks. The next stratum consisted entirely of a thick line that Artemis decided was meant to be the earth's crust. The next layer – a smear of clay across the stone – was perhaps the mantle. Below this, a large oval encased a collection of domed and orthogonal buildings. An underground city. Tunnels shot of in many directions from the oval. These, Artemis decided, were pressurizes – perhaps entrances from the surface.

A city under the world's surface. _The deranged imaginings of a condemned man, perhaps? _Artemis considered it. _It would explain the presence of a corpse with the drawings. _It certainly lent more value to the stone.

He listened as the newsreader explained the Asian belief of sprites living in the earth. He knew this folklore well, and could point out errors in her narrative. The anchor then briefly crossed to a historian's rehashing of the Atlantis myth. After more images concerning the wall painting, the newsreader closed with an insipid remark about fairytale endings for the diamond's new owner.

Fairytales. Artemis couldn't help but feel unsettled. Something about that word unsettled him. Why? Had he missed something important?

After a moments thought, Artemis decided that any undue apprehension was probably caused by the upcoming sale of his most recent work – a forged portrait of an elfin maiden. With a minute shake of his head, Artemis dismissed the feeling. He didn't believe in omens. Best rely on things he could prove.

The news program ended with a slide show of the most valuable diamonds from around the world. Regarding each, Artemis came to realise that the Egyptian diamond could be a very good investment for his personal fortune. After all, it might yet turn out that the diamond was more than it appeared. Perhaps of major historical significance. If so, it was worth much more than €500 000, if he could find the right buyer – a major archaeological museum perhaps or even a private collector?

He thought quickly; with the success of the French diamond exchange he could afford a gamble. It would be a challenge. And he already had an inkling of who exactly had purchased the diamond.

Artemis opened his phone once more, and dialled a number. Three rings before it connected. Artemis negotiated, harassed and bribed his way through the network of secretaries and senior businessmen until he gained access to the line he wanted.

'Hello? Señor Jarven Scott? This is Artemis Fowl. – pause – Yes, the Second. I have an offer you may wish to consider…'

-

Holly didn't even bother to rise to her feet. She rolled sideways, managing to get onto her hands and knees before retching up her breakfast. After a moment of heavy breathing, and another chocking gasp, she hazarded another look at the body.

It was very decayed, despite that not much air could have gotten into this chamber. Not much bulk of flesh was left, except, unfortunately for her, around the eye sockets. Just thinking about it made bile rise in Holly's throat.

She clenched her fists, suddenly feeling weakened. She ran her tongue over dry lips, and tasted blood. Very carefully she ran her fingers over her forehead. She winced as they brushed against a gash on her temple. She helped the magic along with a gentle pulse.

As soon as the magic left her fingertips, Holly became aware of something radiating bluish light from on a pedestal in the centre of the platform. Holly crept forward, not wanting any more surprises.

She peered at the object on the plinth. She couldn't exactly see what it was through the hazy glow. She wondered if it was wise to touch it. But, she reasoned, if she didn't then she'd never be able to get it back to Haven. This had to be what was causing the ley-power. There was no point denying either the raised platform or the shining shell that the light created. A quick probe with her magic sight proved her theory.

She reached out to pick it up. The moment her fingertip touched it, the glow-light flared up, illuminating the cave's pale walls, blinding her. Just as the light became unbearable, the flash ebbed.

Holly blinked rapidly, rubbing her watery eyes. When her vision cleared a second time, she looked at the spot from where the light had erupted.

It was a diamond. A Stone – an ancient and precious gem that an Old Mage had gifted with magic.

It lay in a tiny groove obviously meant for that purpose – it fit perfectly. There was even a matching notch in the rock for its golden catch. It was exquisite. Holly knew. Her grandfather had been obsessed by diamonds, and, in her youth, Holly had absorbed some of his enthusiasm. They'd hid their discoveries from her grandmother and mum. It had been like a big game for her younger self – even if she had never really understood why they always did most of their research in the shed outside and always she was always shushed when she tried to share their findings. Holly had learnt later that although it was perfectly understandable to be in thrall of gold, it seemed that it wasn't nearly acceptable to be in such awe with diamonds. This one was a D – a near-perfect diamond.

She resisted the instinct to take a deep breath before she picked the Stone up; she'd had more than she could handle of that death stench. As she held it pensively in her hand, Holly wondered if it was right to take it. It seemed so pure … maybe it would be better if she left it there. To say she'd found nothing … or that she'd just lost it.

_That's impossible!_ Her reason interrupted forcefully. _I can hardly explain that I 'just lost' one of the most powerful artefacts in modern history!_

Holly jerked her hand away from the pedestal decisively. If only she had a leather thong, she'd be able to thread it around her neck. She checked her watch absently, then gasped – and choked – again. It had stopped. She tapped it, then zapped it with her magic, as if a supernatural remedy for flesh could work on a machine. The second counter remained firmly at thirteen.

Out of the corner of her eye, Holly noticed that the gem had started glowing again. Activated by magic perhaps? She imagined, with some satisfaction, Foaly's eye bugging out of his skull as he watched the magic-meter on the power-chart bounce to new heights.

The sick feeling returned in her stomach. Thinking of skulls, Holly decided she should get away from the one causing that smell. Ignoring the nausea as best she could, Holly unstrapped her wings and headed quickly back down the tunnel.

Once outside, she looked up to the dark sky and took several deep breaths. As the sickness in her abdomen faded, she kept looking up. The stars shone brightly – she picked out one of her favourite constellations just rising off the horizon – and the moonlight flooded the cove, drowning the now gentle light coming from the gem.

The moon! Holly looked down at the level of the sea. It seemed to have dropped. Her gaze was drawn into the tumultuous sea churning beneath her. It was whisper quiet, but, should she fall into it, deadly. But it was at least ten feet beneath her…

The caves don't flood. So much for her platform explanation.

She glanced at the diamond. It seemed unassuming enough to the untrained eye. Just like any other diamond. But the cut was impeccable, and the stone was the clearest she'd seen, despite a yellowish tint.

And that feeling she'd had. To leave it alone… Something was going on. This gem was obviously valuable. It _radiated _archaic magic. It had been mounted on a dais for Frond's sake! Why hadn't anyone heard of it? Why had it gone unnoticed for so long?

She tried not to think about it. Surely by the time she got back to the Ops Booth, Foaly would have gotten all the information from his personal search-sweepers. Then they'd have some idea of its origins, _and_ know why no one had discovered it before they had. Having justified it for the time being, Holly turned her thoughts away. She'd never believed in worrying about the future too much. The present was always enough to deal with.

She drew her attention back to the sky-scape. She mentally drew lines between more constellations. The Centaur, the Pixie and the Goblin, the Dé Danann Prince, the Eternal Dragon…She caught herself wishing that she could become human just to see these stars everyday.

The thought was still echoing inside her mind when the world went black before her eyes.

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the long chapter. I'm almost sure they get shorter than this. But I have to line up the dominoes to let them fall/obscureVforVendettareference. Reviews appreciated! Please and thank you?


	3. A Transformation of Lives

**Chapter** **Two**:  
A Transformation of Lives

-

Artemis had never been rejected before. Every business transaction he began, he finished – at loss or profit, though usually it was the latter. He had never learn to equate the word 'no' with the term 'to give up.'

He tapped his fingers on the table, jaw clenched. He had managed to make Jarven Scott quite frustrated – perhaps, Artemis wondered, as frustrated as he himself was feeling. Now, of course, he would have to blackmail Senor Scott – an effort Artemis hadn't wanted to give to this venture.

Artemis became aware that his shoulders were tense. He checked his watch, noting the time. It would be half an hour until Butler arrived back the manor. Half an hour until someone he could talk this over with, or at least, bounce ideas off without being interrupted and irritated in due course. Juliet would probably have served to upset rather than solace his state of mind.

He cast his mind around for something to centre his energy through. Something he could visualise clearly – perhaps the lens.

A knot of tension tightened between his should blades. Another place he had failed. Artemis tried to calm himself. Not the lens then, but something like it. A circle, a burnished metallic silver…or gold? A golden disk. Artemis flexed his fingers, letting his energy within him to flow into the image. To make it shine. To let it go where it took him.

He felt almost as if he was inside the coin. His skin felt hardened, like a shell. His mind analysed it, even as his subconscious displayed the feeling. Did this mean he needed to re-establish his emotional distance? To recreate his shield?

It was as if he was flying. Through a starry black night. The stars blurred into silver threads, the edges hazy. It spun faster for a moment, and all the stars became a single flash of bright light. He was then suddenly standing outside the coin again, watching from the ground. He felt someone at his back – not a physical presence so much as an loyal, mental guard. Could it be Butler? But Butler had never been anymore than a bodyguard…Artemis tried to draw his attention onto the disc again.

A single shot came through the air, perforating the coin with a centred hole. Someone said something … a voice he had never heard. Then there was silence. Not the silence of death, but the silence of the whole universe taking a breath. Blood began to pulse in his ears, and his whole body felt suspended in a heart beat. The moment enveloped his every thought, his every sensation. Every nerve strained to feel what was coming...

–

'Artemis?'

The thrall collapsed around him. His heart beat erratically under his chest, synchronic with his gasping breaths. Artemis tried to regain his composure, despite the lingering awe of …of what? What had that been? His let his eyes close for a moment, and took a deep, deliberate breath before turning to face the doorway.

Butler was leaning against the door, one hand braced against the frame, the other over his chest. 'Artemis…you were…are you okay?'

Artemis set his face, and stood. 'I am well.' He paused, collecting his thoughts. 'You are not due back for another twenty minutes.'

His manservant shook his head hesitantly. 'I am right on time, sir.'

'Oh…of course.' Artemis placed his hands behind his back, lacing his fingers together. He noticed Butler's heaving breathing. Had he ran all the way up hall?

Artemis heard more footsteps. A second later, Juliet ducked under her brother's arm. 'Is everything okay? I heard someone scre–'

Artemis saw Butler's minute shake of head. He, Artemis, had screamed? A spherule of panic crystallised in his chest. What was wrong with him? A dull ache began to stiffen his hands. Artemis realised he had begun to clench them. Arching his fingers, Artemis stared at the tiny crescents his nails had made on his palm.

'Artemis?'

'Juliet. Please. Just go.'

'Artemis, we should get you to a doctor.' Butler's eyes begged for him to be complacent, just to give in. Just once. But Artemis had already given in once that day.

'I am _fine._'

'You don't look it.' Juliet crossed the room, placing her hand under his chin, forcing his gaze upward. He jerked his head away. Somewhere in his mind, Artemis was aware he was being childish.

'I am perfectly well! Leave me alone!' His voice had raised decibels without him even realising it.

'Artemis–'

'_Go_, Domovoi! Leave me, that's an order!'

There was a silence Artemis hadn't expected. He raised his head to meet the Butlers' stares.

'Ah, Artemis?' Juliet's voice was unnaturally alarmed. 'What did you just call Butler?'

'What?' Artemis resisted the urge to blink. It would have made him look stupefied. He wondered again what was happening. 'I call Butler exactly that, how else would I address him?' I did call him Butler. Didn't I? 

'Oh. That's not what I thought you said.'

'What did you hear me say?' The inadequate answer drained the rage from his voice, replacing it with a haze of disorientation.

'I'm sure Juliet was just…confused.' Although the words were spoken to him, Artemis knew Butler meant them for his younger sister.

The three stood silently in the middle of the study for a long moment, where no one dared say anything to break the fragile cease-fire that had just occurred. Artemis wasn't sure who had won.

'I asked you to leave. I would like it if you would do so.'

Juliet nodded, solemn as Artemis had ever seen her, and retreated the way she had come in, squeezing past her brother. Butler bowed slightly, even derisorily, and followed her.

Artemis sank into his back into his Italian leather chair, his mind in turmoil. What had just occurred?

-

'Jarven Scott of Spain, the recent buyer of what has become one of the world's most famous diamonds, has fallen ill today with what doctors are saying is closely linked to mental over-exertion…'

Pressing 'power' on the remote from his desk, Artemis moved his mouse over the link on screen, and double clicked. Artemis surveyed the information before him. Of course, it was an extremely detached observation – Artemis was mildly out of sorts from the events of the previous day. Had they been generally mundane, like a programming failure, he would not have mulled over it for so long. But this was inside his mind. His most important asset was failing him. He wasn't…comfortable with it.

He picked up a paper copy of the wall-painting – the one found with the diamond. Sometimes it helped to have things on paper. It reminded him of something – quite possibly folklore. He must have skimmed this particular story in the National Library somewhere. It wasn't in his personal shelves. He had checked himself. Twice.

Looking back to the screen, Artemis noticed something in the pixel image of the diamond. It looked as if there was writing around the golden catch. He opened up his clarification program, and uploaded the picture. Selecting the appropriate tool, Artemis clicked and dragged a rectangular window around the top of the diamond and zoomed in. He waited patiently for the screen to crystallize.

The markings were etched directly into the gold. Artemis was puzzled. They looked completely foreign – the closest he could guess was that they were ancient Egyptian pictographs. It would make sense; the stone had been found in Egypt. But they weren't hieroglyphics…or at least, not of the Egyptian sort.

Staring absently at them, tracing their curves and lines over with his eyes, Artemis realised with a small shock that he could read them. Not if he concentrated, however, only if he let his subconscious decode them.

'Bound to Klor Phern of the People,' Artemis muttered under his breath. 'Some sort of naming of ownership by ancient culture?'

He opened a new window, and typed in "Klor Phern", completed with inverted commas. It returned nothing, except a site belonging to a Korean accountant. After a moment of thought, Artemis cleared the search and typed in People. Negating the search engine's natural inclination to de-capitalise the term, Artemis found a much more interesting result.

Each site was connected to abstract Asian mythology. The People were supposedly the general term for the society of sprites, pixies and elves who inhabited shrine built for that purpose. Some, called _fae_, lived in the earth itself – the trees, lakes and rivers surrounding sacred sites.

All this seemed too familiar. Had he read this before?

For the first time in his life, Artemis just wanted to bring time to a standstill and crawl into bed. Ever since that business with the disc, he'd been torn into what seemed like two different people. One part of him knew that Butler always obeyed his commands, and had always been an ally, while another insisted he was a _friend_, that he'd risk his life for his charge out of love not professionalism. One of these identities repeated he had never known anything substantial about fairies or supernatural events, while the other maintained he did. It repeated not only that _had _he known, but also that he still knew _now. _

Which was preposterous, naturally, because he couldn't remember. Artemis was just about to close the window when the mouse got stuck on scroll and worked its way down to another image of Asian myth. A small figure, holding what looked suspiciously like an acorn – his first self rebelled against the image. Acorns? In _Asian folklore_? The figure was bending down to place it in the soil…

'Fairies?'

Artemis turned sharply in the revolving chair. Juliet stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. She was grinning. 'I thought you were over fairytales?'

'Did no one ever tell you that it is rude to read over another's shoulder? I am trying to concentrate.' The smile faded and, before his eyes, Juliet's face hardened into something of which Madame Ko would have been proud. Artemis found himself regretting his tone even while wondered whyhe was so disquieted by her reaction. It wasn't as if she had any right to tease him.

'Sorry.' Her voice was as callous as her face. Artemis sighed, closing the window. After a moment of hesitation, he rolled his chair backward and slowly stood. He was almost to the door before her query cut through the enforced silence.

'Fairies, Artemis?'

He just nodded.

'Is this anything to do with you sc– with what happened yesterday?'

He nodded again.

'Well, tell me if you figure it out.'

Artemis felt as if he needed to say something else as he nodded a third time, but could find nothing.

'Uh, bye then.' Juliet's voice was weak. She crossed the room quickly, as if his presence burned her in some metaphorical way. As she disappeared from the doorway, Artemis wondered if he could ever tell her something he didn't even know himself.

-

That night Artemis slept badly.

-

Once something deep in one's mind is unlocked, it does not go willingly back into place. Especially when it doesn't belong where it was trapped in the first place. Before the waking mind slips into sleep, memories can rise as bubbles from the deep subconscious into the resting awareness, unhindered by the strict control one has over his thoughts while awake. And – of course – when so much is being returned into conscious memory, it is understandably difficult to sleep.

So, when Artemis finally went to bed, he didn't sleep soundly.

He did, however, dream…

-

_His heartbeat rose again in anticipation, panic constricting his chest. Being struck by lightening was not an apt metaphor for what he felt. It was as if he himself was the bolt of fire, hurtling toward the earth at an impossible speed – truly that of light. _

_He hit the ground at this terrific speed, his head erupting with a blaze of white light as he hit the ground. He felt as if the impact had ripped his spirit from his physical being and thrown it high into the stars. He floated there, a detached observer of his own world._

_Emotions rose and rested in the young genius's head. He remembered remembering, which was curious, almost like looking into parallel mirrors. He recalled his last conversation with the People – trying to convince – begging – them to let him keep his memories. Anger at himself for becoming exactly what he'd warned them against…then anger at them for not stopping him. His anger at Holly was intermingled with gratitude…she'd tried, at least – despite being trapped in the chain of command, as Butler had been trapped in his, when Artemis had ordered him to dispose of the Limerick contact…_

_The dream faded into another, and that into more, until finally Artemis forgot again what he had dreamt._

_-_

For hours, he drifted in and out of sleep. In the times he actually he realised he was awake, he tried to moan, to scream, to do something.. but he felt paralysed, totally helpless. A throbbing pain thumped restlessly inside his chest and skull, seeming to override his heart beat. That pulse was a faint echo to this one. He endured it not by choice but by necessity. Somewhere in his mind, Artemis knew this was the culmination of something. Something important.

As the sun rose, it faded, to be replaced with a burning fever and nausea.

Eventually, Artemis slipped into a more natural sleep.

-

Foaly tapped his fingers on the keyboard. His eyes slid over the quires of information scrolling onto the screen. These displayed information from the latest earthquake's epicentre. It had been severe – it was as if the more recent quakes had been mere pre-shocks to this one, and they had been severe enough. The seism had, co-incidentally, occurred just after Holly had reached the surface – and also, unbeknownst to Foaly, just as Artemis had discovered the existence of the "Egyptian" diamond. Information came in from Tara and out as far as Atlantis, including casualty and damage rates.

He squinted at desktop, noting how his eyes throbbing every time he closed them, even briefly. He'd been sitting at the same desk for three hours, writing a progress report for the Council. Three hours and he was still only a thousand or so words into it. No matter how many times he hit the word count button, the number didn't seem to change.

And _now_ – despite his photographic memory – he couldn't remember the total damages of the Atlantis disaster. And he'd looked it up three times.

The computer screen flickered wildly. Foaly ignored it. The whole system was running off auxiliary power. Haven's earthquake had shut of electricity to the whole central district and that included even the Ops Booth.

Something thumped against the side of the building, sending impact alerts onto the second screen. Rioters. Hardly surprising, that the citizens would want their power back, even though it had only been out for a short while.

_Liar._

Although it was the explanation Foaly gave himself, he knew the power outage wasn't the reason for the uprising. The truth was fear. What if the power didn't come back on? They'd seen buildings reduced to piles of rubble; what if it happened to their houses? They'd seen the black plastic bags lining the streets; what if it happened to their families?

This thing was scaring people.

And the truth was that he was scared too.

It looked, from the calculations alone, like the fairy cities were shaking themselves apart. His eyes strayed to the third and final screen that was actually running. The power-chart. Sometime before eleven o'clock, the marking had changed. One part of the green splotch had changed colour. Now it was a perfect circle of yellow. With this new development, Foaly could see that this mark wasn't just one ley-power site but three, overlapping to form the larger daub over Europe. Which meant there were two more power sources to find before this madness stopped, if his hypothesis about the connection between them and the earthquakes proved to be correct.

And then there was Holly.

Foaly sighed, his fingers stilling on the keyboard. It replayed over in his mind like a bad mud-man soapie – Julius had sent out a team of the officers to find her when the iris cam went blank, just as she entered the cave site. Find her they did. Unconscious just outside the cave, with no magic at all. Not a spark left in her system.

And she was human.

Or rather… she wasn't elfin. Her ears were still pointed, and her features remained the same, but she was large enough to be a teenage Mud-girl. And where ever Mud-people lie, bad things feast. Even if they were synthetic Mud-maidens doing the lying.

His premonitions were cut short by a chime from his computer. A large, purple quill appeared on screen. It scribed, 'You've got E-mail!' in purple Lucida Cursive.

Foaly heard Root mumble something that probably equated to 'Wasting such a precious resource as electricity on superfluous flourishes is not entirely appropriate to the current situation, Foaly.' That is, if you could be bothered to decipher the grunts, insults and curses. The centaur, however, ignored him, and used voice command to open mail.

_Foaly,_ – the email began –

_It will no doubt please you to know that I now have some recollection of our time together. Specific events are still a little clouded; though I am confident that time will heal all. I would like to further examine the equipment you used to mind-wipe me – perhaps I could improve it?_

_However, I did not write this email purely to gloat. I have a very important piece of news for you. If you would be so kind as to follow onto this link, you will see what I mean._

_Artemis Fowl II._

This was followed by a link to an unknown site.

Well, that was just what they needed. Trust the Mud-boy to saunter straight into the middle of chaos and create another crisis. Oh well. It wasn't as if anyone was particularly _shocked _by the fact Artemis had beaten the fairies again. (Although a few of them would catch themselves thinking he was making it too much of a habit, him being their ally and all.) _Well, _thought Foaly absently_, now at least Holly'll stop with that look she gets when something to do with Fowl comes up._

Still digesting the current news, the centaur quite wasn't sure if he wanted the further update the little blue link had for him. Still, he thought he'd better. That Mud-boy was usually right about these sorts of things – if Artemis wanted him to see something, it must be big. Why else would he expose himself? Unless he just wanted an excuse to come and see _certain_ _people/elves/LEPrecon Captains_? Foaly mentally congratulated himself on this brave show of levity, and made a mental note to share the joke with Holly.

But, as the link opened and the page finished loading, Foaly quickly decided this was perhaps _not _the time for levity after all.


	4. Shining Magic

**Chapter Three**:

_"Red stone, Blue stone, Yellow stone,_

_Shine!_

_All together, sing in time!"_

A Fairy-child nursery rhyme.

Holly wanted to open her eyes, but she felt so content just laying there – on the soft mattress, her eyes closed, listening to the soft murmur of sounds above her – that she didn't. Just as her ears began to adapt to undulating rhythm of the sounds, they sharpened into actual speech.

'– bone and lung fibres are holding up to the pressure, even this close to the core. But her magic…'

Holly moaned softly, involuntarily. The voice speaking – female, Holly guessed by the pitch – suddenly cut off. A cool hand was pressed to her forehead, and she felt something forcing her eyes open. A blinding light occupied her vision for a moment, then another. Holly realised they must be checking her response signs.

'Holly? Are you awake?' She recognised Foaly's horsey tone right away. She tried to smile, despite the fact her body seemed reluctant to move even a little bit.

'Mmm-hmm…' Now _that_ sounded helpless. Holly mentally chastised herself, and opened her eyes to meet Foaly's grin. She rolled her eyes a little at his expression, before panic thrilled through her spine. 'Where is it?'

'Where's what?' Foaly raised one eyebrow. 'Your sanity? I'm sorry, you lost that _long _before you came in here.'

She didn't bother answering. She thrashed for a moment, before she realised she was clenching her fingers tightly into a ball. Her fingers seemed frozen in position, cramped and stiff. After rubbing her fist furiously with her other hand, Holly managed to pry her fingers away.

At first she wandered if she was seeing things. It didn't feel as if the stone was in her hand; there wasn't even the tiniest pressure or weight. It was as if the gem had melded to her skin, and Holly had the bizarre notion that if she was to tip her hand, it would stick to her palm like hot wax. But then, as she wriggled her fingers, the strange melted sensation dissipated and the stone tipped sideward a little. She closed her hand over it for a moment – ridiculously content and relieved by the fact it was there – before she held it out for Foaly to examine. As she watched it, it glinted in dim candlelight.

_Candles_? It seemed strange to Holly, that there were no lights, but Foaly's next statement made her hold any questions.

'I already know.'

Holly blinked, wondering if she'd heard wrong. 'What? What do you already know?'

'I know…' he paused. 'A lot has happened since you fainted.'

Holly was about to protest that she hadn't fainted (she wasn't helpless!), when Foaly told her just _how_ much things had changed.

-

Holly crouched on one of Foaly's chairs, her eyes taking in the scattering of papers over the desk. One showed the stone engraving of Haven, and another a gem identical to Holly's – complete with arcane magic. Her stone lay next to them, threaded on a thick gold chain.

Artemis was standing over them. He had openly stared at each of them during his recount of events on the surface, but now his gazes were less frequent and more inquisitive. As if he couldn't make sense of something. Probably a stray memory from his unorthodox recall…

'So. What do you want for this, Fowl?' Holly noticed her commander's voice was resigned.

'Can't I just do this for the sake of old friends?' Holly looked up, expecting to see a smirk hovering over his face, but instead met a perfectly neutral gaze.

'Just tell us so you can be on your way.'

'On my way?' His voice was quite deadpan and he had looked almost anguished, but now his smirk betrayed his amusement. 'I am going to help you to … retrieve … the stone.'

'You can't keep it, Fowl. The Council would never allow it.' Root practically spat the words. Holly had the feeling that even if the stone hadn't been causing such power surges (even if it had no power at all) Root wouldn't have wanted Fowl anywhere near it anyway.

'I do not intend on retaining the possession of the stone.'

'What _do_ you intend on then?' Holly tapped her fingers pointedly on the table. She stopped herself from snapping the words, but only just. She felt ashamed of losing her temper, but then, she _was_ tired – and she had no magic to give her a shot of energy.

'I _do _intent on a small commission. Captain.' It took Holly a moment to realise he was answering her, and made an attempt to look alert. 'A finder's fee, if you will.'

'You haven't _found_ anything!' This sentence was punctuated with a puff of green smoke in the Mud-boy's direction. Artemis calmly waved his hand to clear the air.

'But I will. You will need my assistance on-site at Jarven's museum, seeing as that is where he is holding the diamond. Evading alarms and such like.'

Foaly snorted. 'I can deactivate any Mud-man alarm.'

'Not from the Ops Booth you can't.'

'Say what?' Foaly made a curious motion with his hands, as if he suddenly didn't know what to do with them. 'Why?'

'Jarven's museum is on a closed circuit. No broadcasting outside of the building – signal insulation inside the wall panels.'

This shocked Foaly – Holly could tell from the sudden tightness in his stance, even if his tone remained arrogantly unconcerned. 'So how exactly are _you_ going to break through then?'

'I will bring my portable platform. The signal will be inside the same room as the alarm device, an as such, will not be absorbed by the insulator.'

Holly glanced at Foaly. He, in turn, looked to Root. 'We will need him after all.'

Holly stood up, carefully not stepping forward or back. She'd already knocked over the table once. 'If you can do this yourself, then why did you come down here?'

Artemis shrugged, turning to face her. 'I had guessed that the diamond was of fairy origin. I decided I would get more gold from the Council than from the free market. Especially considering its …' Holly fought to control her temper as his eyes slid from her face to her boots and back again. '.. magical aspects. Besides, I never said I wouldn't need your help.'

'What do you need from _us_ then, if you're so smart?'

'A time-stop.'

The whole room stopped then, all thought suspended. Holly (although she had been caught silently berating herself for making such a childish remark) was the first to recover, wrestling with her tone to keep it under control. Recon officers don't shriek.

'A _time-stop_?'

Artemis nodded impatiently. 'Jarven's security case incorporates a series of filaments that alert him to exactly when an artefact is removed from its casing.'

'So?' Holly doubted this minor detail was why he needed their help. 'Just, I don't know, over-ride it…that _is_ what you do isn't it?'

'Those filaments are much more complicated than the alarm system itself, although it doesn't sound as if it would be true.' He paused, as if wondering to go on. 'Furthermore, I need an alibi. A very solid alibi. That would be impossible should I over-ride the filament – except myself, no one in Europe has the skill to disconnect the device manually.' Artemis moved his eyes around the room before amending the statement. 'Except perhaps Foaly.'

Holly made a face at the alibi comment – somewhere between a sneer and a smirk. 'You mean you've harassed this guy already?'

'I negotiated. With poor results.' Holly was surprised to find that Artemis was giving her his vampire grin. She almost stepped back. But didn't.

'_You_,' Holly said, grinning back, 'don't negotiate. You _harass_.'

Root seemed to feel very left out of the conversation. 'Do we have any idea what power this other Stone has?'

'Well…' Foaly looked reluctant to leave the current topic of alarms and technologies. Holly knew why; when Artemis had been mind wiped, Foaly had complained almost non-stop that no one else understood him. Now that he was back, she knew her friend would be wringing the genius for all his worth, just in case the Council decided to mind wipe him again. She tuned her attention into the centaur's words as he continued. 'Judging by the fact a sketch of Haven was found near by, it seems to me it provides visions – of the present at least.'

Holly wondered if anyone was going to tell Artemis about the third power source – the last blank in the triad of circles appearing on the power-chart. No one did, and she didn't enlighten him.

Root finally took charge of the situation. 'OK. Well, I suppose I'll send Fowl back to his castle, then, and get you to work on Recon, Short.'

'Actually,' Artemis interrupted, 'I will need someone from the underground to come back with to Fowl _Manor_ to return Juliet and Butler their memories. I'm assuming a familiar face would aid the process?'

'You mean you haven't given them their memories yet?' Root jabbed a sausage-like finger at the Mud-teen.

'My experience was a little painful. I didn't want to put them through two days of fever and nausea when they might be needed for the approaching venture. Is there a less intrusive way that Holly could re-awaken them?'

Root frowned. 'You do realise that it will take a while to train her, if I allow her to help you at all.' Holly herself was aware that her opinion hadn't been asked at any stage in these proceedings. 'A memory-release isn't a job for amateurs.'

'I managed it…' Holly heard Artemis mutter under his breath. She spoke to cover it.

'Actually, sir, I'm already qualified.'

She watched as Root began to splutter. He'd even gone a little white. It was slightly scary to see him deviate from his usual crimson routine. She noticed Artemis was staring at her, as if she was the one going deathly pale and not her commander.

Eventually, Root began to form coherent words again. 'You mean, you – you _knew _this would happen?'

She had, actually, but she wasn't about to tell them that. She widened her mouth into her sweetest smile. She'd practiced this look in the mirror, and – despite the sickening fact she felt a little like Lily Frond – she knew it was effective.

'I was on the team that tested the process. As a precaution, of course.'

'In that case,' appended Foaly (who, Holly noted, hadn't been involved in the conversation to begin with, but had still found an odd place to enter), 'you can go top-side and catch-up the Butlers–'

'– and then come back here and organise Recon.' Holly finished. Foaly took a second before nodding. She tried hard to ignore the clenching of her instincts beneath her stomach. Remembering the promise she made in the cave site, she re-assured herself that this was _Foaly_ they were talking about, not some potentially zombie-ridden cave.

Holly turned to walk through the doorway. She turned her head to look back, and her eyes locked with Artemis's. She resisted the urge to pull her gaze away. After holding his stare for a few seconds in defiance, Holly realised what she must look like – a half-wit troll, her mind supplied – standing part-way in the corridor, looking over her shoulder. Her mind raced to come up with something to say.

'Where's the coin? Does Mulch still have it?'

'Yes. I mean to contact him and retrieve it.'

Holly tried to nod firmly. It probably looked more like she was bobbing her head.

'I'll find the convict,' Root said gruffly. 'He owes me.'

Foaly nodded too. He really _did_ look like a horse bobbing its head, Holly noticed with a genuine smile. The centaur was unfazed.

'If we can dig in as far as we can go before hitting solid steel, then we could bypass some of the alarm systems.' After a slight pause, he seemed to realise something. 'How, exactly, is Mulch indebted to the LEP?'

Root's mouth recreated Holly's sneer/smirk hybrid. 'You didn't notice that I never sent any officers after him?'

Holly had noticed, but had said nothing despite her curiosity. Now seemed like a good time to assuage it.

'Why?' Her question joined Foaly's at the precise moment he asked it.

'Probably the same reason you brushed up on mind-release two weeks after Fowl got wiped.' Root looked pointedly at Artemis. 'I knew _he'd_ be back. And every time we deal with _him_, we always have to deal with Mulch.' On the emphasis, Root's gaze shifted to the ground beneath their feet as if he expected the convict to appear from underneath it.

Holly caught Foaly's eye with a sideward glance, and resisted the urge to laugh, both at the fact that Root had echoed one of her more previous sediments, and at his apparent 'foresight'. Holly thought it was more likely that he'd _forgotten_ to send officers after Mulch and was weaving an elaborate excuse.

'That's Julius!' crowed Foaly, his hands tapping his superior's shoulder admirably. 'Always thinking ahead! Like with his collection of ladies' lingerie – those frilly panties could come in useful one day! '

Holly decided she needed to get out of the Ops Booth before she got demoted by association or conspiracy or suchlike. And so, she finally completed what she had began five minutes ago – the demanding ordeal of walking out the door.

-

As Holly settled into the undersized shuttle seat, she tried not to remember why it felt so tight. Her commonsense told her that she couldn't keep putting off facing the fact that she was human (or, at least, humanoid). She also knew that the denial she had put into place couldn't last long. In fact, Holly felt that it was already closing in on her. Maybe once she got to the surface she could attempt the change back. Hopefully, she didn't knock herself out again.

She pushed all thoughts of her transformation aside, and concentrated on getting the shuttle safely out of the landing port. She timed it well – the passing flare left in its wake enough thermal to allow her to coast on her laurels for a while. Although it was something that didn't suit her personality very well, it complimented her shuttle skills just fine.

The unfortunate thing about this was that it gave her time to think. Absently, she ran her fingers along her collarbone, and around her necklace. She wondered how quickly she'd become accustomed to its weight – she even seemed to develop a headache when she ventured too far from the gem itself.

Her regard followed her left hand to the gear stick, hovering there with lingering inattention until her gaze slipped sideward to the passenger seat. There, looking at ease despite the tiny chair, Artemis sat reclined, his eyes shut. She wondered if he was asleep. _Only humans – _thought Holly with a wry smile – _could sleep when one of these old shuttles gets moving. With that cargo bay on the back, this thing rattles like a scared snake._

As soon as she had finished thinking the thought, the mini-plasma above the control panel decided it was far enough away from the flare to starting working again. Foaly's face flashed onto the screen, swam in a haze of green for a moment, and then settled again.

'Does the Mud-boy snore?'

Holly frowned slightly. The camera's field of vision didn't encompass the passenger's seat. 'How did you know he'd be asleep?'

Foaly laughed. 'Non-_mesmer_ized recall is gradual – it takes any where from twelve to forty eight hours. It's hard for memories to move between conscious and subconscious lobes without the mind being awake, but unless the mind is relaxed it won't happen it all.'

Holly thought she might have actually understood that. 'And since the mind is most relaxed when or just before you're sleeping, then that's the stage the brain tries to reach, right? Which means that Fowl wouldn't have slept at all last night?'

'Not much.' Foaly nodded, looking impressed. 'Maybe Mud-boy's _not_ the only one who understand my lectures! Maybe I don't have to put up with the cocky comments after all!'

Holly widened her eyes in mock horror. 'You mean you didn't enjoy Artemis's presence in the Ops Booth? Near your precious computers?'

'I am right here, you realise.' Holly looked sharply at the reclining figure beside her. His eyes were closed, and for a second he almost reminded her of when she'd mind-wiped him. Except the expression on his face.

'You think I can forget? You stink, Mud-boy. Like human sweat.' She punched him in the arm.

'It's no fault of mine that the LEP doesn't receive enough funding to install air conditioners in their shuttles.' He opened one eye and looked sidelong at her.

Holly felt her cheeks heat up in indignation. 'Just because you've got cash to stuff you pillow with doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with budget cuts!'

'I could not stuff my pillows with notes, as my fortune is in gold bars.' He smirked. She wanted to wipe the smile right of his cocky face. 'They would be most uncomfortable to sleep on.'

'Well, it might do you head some good to know what sleeping on the floor of an apartment is like! They're probably paying you more for this one mission than I get in a whole decade!' She felt the shuttle pull at little to the left. Holly glanced down to see her knuckles whitening where she was clutching the control stick. It was enough to make her realise she had to calm down.

Foaly must have pressed a button down in the Ops Booth, because at that moment a flashing siren descended from the ceiling with a small whoop.

'Note to self–' Holly heard Foaly mutter, '–take all sharp objects out of shuttles before sending Short and Fowl anywhere.'

'Have you figured out what entrance I'm taking?' asked Holly.

'Tara,' replied Foaly, and his voice told her he knew that his comment was being ignored.

She saw Artemis smirk in her peripheral vision. She arched an eyebrow. '_Go back to sleep, Mud-boy._ Don't you think I've forgotten.'

It took Holly a moment to remember that her _mesmer_ wasn't working, but Artemis closed his eyes obligingly. Holly guessed he really must have been tired because a few minutes later, she noticed – courtesy of sharp elfin hearing which had remained despite her transformation – that his breathing had deepened into the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.

As the thermals faded, Holly felt the pressure on the shuttle's engine to keep the current speed, and flicked over to three-quarter power. As they rose swiftly to the surface, Holly wondered what exactly she was getting into. Her memory responded automatically with a comment of its own – a wild plot, a seat-of-the-pants adventure. _And more biting exchanges with Artemis_, she added silently.

After pulling the shuttle into landing gear, Holly followed the memory to its conclusion.

_Had she missed him?_

She didn't need to think about it. Or even move to deny it. She had. There was no use trying to prove it otherwise, especially to herself. But there was no way in this life (or any other) she was telling _him _that!

-

Somewhere, between Fowl Manor and the edge of the Fowl's extensive grounds, Holly looked up at the starry sky, her mind in turmoil. She held an acorn loosely in her hand.

Her magic had returned to her – sometime between the last healing and her trying to preform the Ritual – but she couldn't use it. She could feel it, just beneath the surface. Drawing energy from the ground was like trying to fit more water into a glass that was already overflowing. Yet, she still didn't seem to be able to _mesmer_ize a leaf into falling from an oak tree, let alone a human into remembering what they'd been forced to forget.

It was impossible that her transformation had caused her magic to become blocked – keeping the metamorphosis going had to use magic, so it wasn't that she couldn't use it…more that she couldn't feel where it was. Couldn't reach it. She twined the necklace around her fingers, and let her mind sink down to the base existence – the blood in her veins, her breathing rhythms and the magic fields weaving their power all around her.

Holly expanded her awareness outward, until she could feel the power of the Ritual site. It shied away from her, not by choice but by instinct. Having too much magic at any one time could be fatal – it had been why the Ancient Peoples had created methods of pulling magic from the earth into their charka before releasing it to their body in its entirety. Of course, back when those methods were in use, magic could be accessed from any where – not just restricted Ritual locations. At any rate, modern magic access points barely contained enough magic to fill one fairy's _physical_ being, let alone their endless spiritual charkas.

Holly tried to get her bearings. Space was different dimension when seen purely through the higher sight – not measured in inches or meters, only brightness and depth.

Holly could feel the existence of every spark of magic, even the untouchable well just outside her reach. Everything shone, but not everything shone the same. Some magic charkas were so small that they were ineffective. The Ritual site was bright and deep, glowing around her as if she sat on the hearth of a fire – but any human would have seemed miles away, even if they were sitting right beside her.

The Stone shone, an ember within a fire. She reached out her awareness until it brushed against the face of the diamond. The golden shine enveloped her own.

Something stirred in her Sight. Spider webs of blue-black lines criss-crossed her vision, seemingly dark, but shining brighter than even the Ritual site. As if opening her eyes, Holly saw the same power inside her charka. It seemed to be both more surreal and more potent than the veil of gold that covered everything else.

She reached out her awareness to brush against the matrix of lines, and froze in shock. Wherever her consciousness touched, magic dissipated into her. She felt it breach the invisible barrier that had kept it contained, and flood her body from her charka outward – extending, pulling, stretching, forcing – until she thought her skin would tear apart.

It rushed through her as an unvanquishable torrent, never-ending, until Holly realised (with a start that shook her out of her stupor) that the purpose of the barrier that had separated from her magic had been_ to keep her alive_. She pulled her mind away from the joining, and almost fainted.

As it was, the world collapsed around her in a spiral of colour, sending her sprawling onto her back. As her sight cleared, Holly thought for a second that the shock of having millennia old magic run straight into her heart had killed her – complete with the approaching globe of white, the divine portal to reincarnation.

It took her a few seconds to realise it was the moon.

She tried to get to her feet, and managed – but just barely. Her legs were shaking as hard as her hands were. She eventually gave up trying to hook the necklace back around her neck and started the trek back to Fowl Manor.

_Always trust the magic. Wasn't that what that old mage was always telling you in Cadets, Holly? Why not remember it sooner? _Obviously a thousand or so watts of the stuff had been enough to jog her memory.

Holly smiled. At least now she could go and give the Butlers back theirs.

**A/N: **This hasn't been updated in ages! I kind of lapsed into denial for months, because of school and life, and circumstance ...

But! It will be back on track now so I will be updating (at least once a week, probably more.)

Kim.


	5. Acrobatic Retrieval

**Chapter 4**

Holly checked Butler's consciousness for any rejection effects. Clear.

His mind flowed smoothly, ideas all connected to one another – a welcome side effect of meditation. Holly had easily separated the truth from the fiction, and replaced memories where before there had only been fabricated notions. Thankfully, his mind didn't cling to the blocks that the mind-wipe had set into his memory. In fact, the blocks themselves were quite loose. When Holly had finished weaving his memories back into place, the tapestry was seamless.

She didn't hold quite as high hopes for Juliet. She observed the girl. She was high-strung, stubborn and hormonal. But at least she _looked_ peaceful. Holly sat down beside the Mud-girl and regarded her visage more intently. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was slightly parted, courtesy of the relaxation the _mesmer _had infused into her thought patterns.

'You look nervous.' Butler stood beside her, leaning forward to regard his sister also. His saucepan hands were crammed into the tiny pockets of his Armani suit, and his mouth was a grim slash over his face.

'I am,' Holly admitted, after a hesitation. 'But you don't have to worry – it'll go fine.'

'But there can be complications.'

Holly ticked them off in her mind – brain damage, compulsive resistance, schizophrenia, chronic despondency and permanent depression…

'Nothing to worry about.'

Butler's mind-release had taken up most of her magic. It was the equivalent to healing his gun shot wound all over again – despite outside appearances, memory healing was much harder than fixing a cut or a graze. It was an ordeal in itself.

She pulled the remainder of her magic together to create a comforting atmosphere for Juliet, before withdrawing into the higher sight.

Holly had found that if she brushed against the ley line inside the Stone, she could bypass the block and access the magic without it swamping her system. She had to almost not think about it, or she would begin to feel as if she was suffocating – or drowning.

'_Juliet? Can you tell me where Artemis went yesterday?' _Her tone was supplied with overtones of sweet sounding melodies.

'Well,' Juliet began, her eyes jittering beneath her lashes, 'He went to school…'

'_Butler wasn't there, was he?'_

'No.' Juliet shook her head. It looked strange with her eyes partially closed. Then she frowned, a small crease appearing between her eyebrows. 'Why not?'

'_Because he wasn't going to school, was he? He was going to somewhere else – to a place called Haven. Do you know Haven?'_

'I think…I don't know!' Her voice rose to a dangerous pitch at the end of the exclamation. Holly quickly backed away from that train of thought.

'_It's okay, just relax. Can you tell me who _I _am?'_

She laughed. It was piercing, almost like a cockatoo. Juliet never would have allowed herself to laugh like that if she had been in full control, but the _mesmer_ removed any inhabitations from the mind, so nothing one did seemed embarrassing.

'You should know who you are! But, you know, I recognise you. I shouldn't, because I don't know you, do I?'

'_Maybe you do and you don't realise it?'_ suggested Holly. It was always better to make the subject think they had reached the conclusions on their own. Questions were always best.

'Maybe…you look strange though. I would remember people like you.'

She squinted at the girl. Despite being technically an elf in genetics, Holly was still looking perfectly human – except for the pointed ears. But if it would make Juliet feel better…she let go of some of her power, holding to her own consciousness instead of Juliet's for a moment, and slipped back into elfin form.

'_I'm sure you would have. Why don't you think about it? What do I look like to you?'_

Juliet pouted, lower teeth biting on her top lip. 'But you'd get angry…'

'_No, I promise I won't…'_ Holly tried her best to look understanding, even if Juliet couldn't see her.

'Well, you looked kind of like…well, like a midget.'

Holly tried valiantly to keep her face fixed in expression of open empathy. '_Do I? Are you sure I don't look more like an elf?'_

'A dwarf maybe…'

A dwarf? _Now_ Holly was insulted. She looked nothing like a dirty, fat dwarf. Resisting the urge to knead her temples until the tightness drained away, Holly kept her eyes fixed firmly on Juliet. '_Are you sure?_'

'Yes. Like one of those people who have that thing that makes them all small. And cute. Although, that other one wasn't cute.'

'_Which other one?' _Holly felt a sense of déjà vu from their conversation in the kidnapping. Maybe some of the barriers were slipping.

'You know which one. Him with the reddy-ruddy-ness-ness. You know him, I know you know him.'

'_Oh, that's right. Root, isn't it?'_

'Roots? I don't know any roots. I don't like roots. I don't _like_ radishes.' Holly wondered if the whiny tone in which she said the last sentence was a memory from her childhood. Progress, finally. Even if she didn't remember Root, they were at least getting memory flow.

'_Don't worry, I don't like radish either. But, I tell you what I do like; I like Christmas – and _fairies_.'_

'Fairy lights?' asked Juliet. Holly thought about interrupting her before she had to admit to liking fairy lights as well, or worse, discussing what wrestling gear the girl had gotten for Christmas. 'Oh! And tinsel! And holly! Hey, that's funny! Do you like holly, Holly?'

'_How do you know my name is Holly?'_ Beneath her _mesmer_, Holly could feel Juliet's awareness twist.

'It's just Holly. You know, how do you know my name's Juliet-tah? 'Cause I told you, or Artemis told you, I forget…' She paused, as if gathering her thoughts. 'You're here, but you're not supposed to be and you are… but why _are_ you here?'

'_Oh, it's very important. But what's _more_ important is that you just close your eyes for a little while, just until I've finished doing something for you, okay?'_

'Oh-k_aaa_y…' With that snappy parting, Juliet slumped into the lounge chair.

Holly tried to part the mind-blocks keeping the natural memories from returning, but Juliet's subconsciousness clung to them tightly. She tugged gently at first, and then with more force until they came away with something equivalent to the crackle of released static.

Wherever she could, Holly pulled away the prevarications to prevent them from conflicting with the natural memories. She had more success with some than others – apparently Juliet had tricked herself into thinking she'd won a wrestling award while they'd been retrieving the C Cube. Holly gently plucked the thoughts of self esteem associated with the event and rewired them onto another memory. Leaving them hanging might have given her egotistical tendencies until the brain re-organised itself – and dealing with Artemis exposed her to enough conceit as it was.

Holly leant back into the soft backrest of the lounge. She drew several thin strands of magic from the Stone into her charka. After waiting a second while the barrier between the ley-line and her body solidified, Holly released the sparks to heal her fatigue.

'So,' Holly said, glancing expectantly up at Butler. 'Got any ice-cream?'

'I thought fairies hated the cold?' Her gaze snapped onto the source of the noise. Artemis was leaning nonchalantly against the doorway, both eyebrows raised in question.

'Most fairies,' Holly replied just as casually. 'But I've gone diving in the Artic Ocean – somehow ice-cream just doesn't compare.'

She shot a smile at Artemis before shaking the stiffness out of her limbs. She raised herself, with considerable effort, off the downy lounge chair, and treaded barefoot across the cashmere carpet to the kitchen.

Opening the door of the refrigerator, Holly sighed gratefully as the cool air blasted her cheeks.

_Now, I wonder if they have peach and peppermint?_

_-_

Side-by-side with a view of Dublin's city lights, a small window on the screen of Holly's helmet flickered with Foaly's visage.

And Holly couldn't believe what he'd just said.

'Did you just tell me… that the Council isn't letting us recover the diamond?'

'They didn't say … that – precisely. Only that they won't be sending a Retrieval team. Publicity. You do remember that Fowl is supposed to be mind-wiped, don't you?' Foaly tried to look compromising. Holly thought he did rather badly.

'Surely they want the LEP's best _men _handling it?' Holly stared defiantly at his face, even though the camera was on point of view. She wasn't entirely convinced that bad publicity would be enough to stop the Council from wanting someone else to take over from the crazy (and still probated) girly captain.

'That's another thing…they can't risk a fully trained Retrieval team. Not in a high securitydwelling.' Holly felt her eyebrows lock together.

'So they're just going to risk a fully trained Recon captain, is that it?'

She could see his brain scrambling for a euphemism. Since the next words out of his mouth were what they were, Holly guessed he'd failed.

'Well…yeah.'

'Okay. Okay.' Something occurred to her. 'So, what's to stop me from commandeering the shuttle back to the underground?'

'Julius said you'd say that. He told me to tell you this – one, because it's an order, and two, because Captain Kelp was hiding in your cargo bay… and as a direct result you no longer have a shuttle to commandeer.'

'You mean, you abandoned me up here?' Holly tried hard to keep her voice level. Despite her efforts, it still pitched violently. 'In Artemis's Manor. With no choice _whatsoever_.'

'Think positive…' The consolatory tone resurfaced. 'You, uh, got promoted?'

Holly was pretty sure that Foaly could see her raised eyebrow from down in Haven.

'Yeah. I don't suppose my pay packet gets any thicker?'

Holly saw him shake his head, and sighed dramatically. She reached her hand up to flick the off switch on the helmet.

'Ah, Holls? You aren't…mad at me are you?' Holly paused, mid-motion, almost touched by the concern in his eyes. If she hadn't know that Foaly was incapable of sincere emotion, she might have fallen for it. Still, she kept the connection alive to hear his next words. 'I mean, I know you'd beat those jocks any moon.'

Holly grinned, before realising he couldn't see her. She laughed loudly to make up for it. 'Nah. All of these doubting Apostles are going to look great on my biography.'

Foaly squinted. 'You have a biography?'

'I will, someday, when this epic is written into fairy history.' Holly infused a prophetic tone into her words. 'Figures of legend are never appreciated in their life-times. Only when they've died courageous and dramatic deaths are they remembered for their true brilliance!' She threw her arms out wide in a dramatic flourish, before realising Foaly couldn't see her.

'Just don't go dying on us yet, okay? No one else would be able to handle Fowl – or his insane schemes.'

Holly laughed again. 'Knowing Artemis, he'll unlock the secrets of the elixir of life and become immortal. Then I'll have to keep on living forever, just so I deal with the inevitable disasters.'

'I suppose you'll just have to keep on being an unappreciated heroine.'

'Just like you'll keep on being an unappreciated genius?'

Foaly bowed his head abjectly. 'Sad, but true.'

A wave of interference drove static through the transmission for a moment, cutting their extended angst to an abrupt end.

'See you when I get back from saving the world, Foaly.'

With the rejoinder, Holly flicked the switch on her helmet and went to search for the guest bedrooms.

-

Below her, in Haven's technological fortress, Foaly watched the screen go black.

'Don't worry about the world Holly. Just worry about yourself.'

-

Juliet rummaged around her backpack, holding it aloft with one hand. With an exclamation of delight, she punched the air with her free fist, before passing Holly a slip of paper held between her fore and middle fingers. Holly examined it, turning it over in her hands.

'Are you sure this will work?' asked Holly, pocketing the ticket. 'I don't want to end up puking all over my new boots.'

'Of course. This is hardly a human dwelling. The tickets are used for admission, so I would imagine they could be classes as an invitation.' Artemis had answered for his bodyguard. Juliet seemed busy examining Holly's fashion statement.

Holly didn't feel convinced. 'What exactly did the cashier say to you, Juliet?'

'I asked him if I could come back later with a friend, say 3 o'clock. And he said…' Juliet looked skyward for a moment. '"Sure, you and your friend come back any time you want, babe." Then he told me to shove off because I was blocking the line.'

'He said that exactly?'

'Quote, unquote.' Juliet flashed a confident smile in Holly's direction.

Holly looked up at the building, feeling dwarfed – for lack of a less affected word. She removed a tiny piece of technology from her pocket, and flipped open the lid. Foaly had embedded a small monitor into the cover. Holly ran her fingers over the Gnommish symbols. The whole thing glittered with the sheen of newness.

'Hello, Haven? This is Operation Ice.'

'Crack the code, Holly, the line's secured.' She was relieved to hear Foaly's voice. Without the time-portal they never would have gotten as far as the front door.

Holly craned her neck back to regard the slightly shimmering dome that appeared to shield the building. A time-stop, invisible to all but the fairies. And Holly. She'd been careful to retain sensitivity even in her human shape.

The stop had been initiated at 17:30, using the human clock. Half an hour had passed, and the time had come. Holly couldn't help but feel uneasy. Her magic was still raw and wild, and she mightn't be able to shield in time upon discovery. Subconsciously, her eyes darted around the immediate area.

She bunched her fingers into a fist, trying to clear her head. She reminded herself forcefully of what Artemis had said: this was no worse than Spiro industries had been, and with much less variability. Still, having an unstable magical artefact in her possession wasn't entirely helping matters. If, as Foaly had suspected, this diamond was what was partly responsible for causing earthquakes in Haven, then the whole building might just collapse around them when they tried to remove it. But, no good thinking about pessimistic possibilities. Yet.

'OK, entrance time, six oh seven evening, human clock. Portal initiating. I assume you want to take a direct timeline into the stop?'

Holly nodded absently, her eyes searching the vicinity once more. Three feet to their left, hidden from the street by a large hedge fence, the air parted to reveal an indigo gap in the barely visible time-field.

'Is it there?' Foaly didn't sound at all worried. Holly knew he thought his software was infallible.

'Yep. So are we all clear on mission objectives?'

Juliet laughed, flouncing across the limestone path to stand next to the portal. 'What objectives? Get in, nab the gem and get the hell o–'

Something erupted from the edge of the pathway, interrupting Juliet's insubordination. Dirt and slightly thicker material flew through the air. Holly realised what it was a few seconds after Artemis – who had sidestepped the mess to hide behind her. Though the angle of ascension combined with her stain-proof uniform saved her from most of the barrage, Holly didn't completely escape from the odour offensive that followed it. Brushing a light dusting of dirt from her new boots, she waited for Mulch to climb out of his tunnel.

'Sorry abou' thad Captain…' Mulch aimed a big toothy grin in her direction, complete with mouthful of dirt. He then bowed with about as much elegance as a over-weight sea lion, turning the smile in Juliet's direction. 'A pleasure as always – _Stinker_.'

In the corner of her gaze Holly caught Artemis's raised eyebrow. As if just noticing him, Mulch turned away from a disgusted Juliet to regard the cleanest member of their trinity.

'Thought you might want this back, eh?' With that ambiguous sentence, the dwarf handed Artemis a wrapped package. He did so with considerable relish, stifled by the look of regret on his face. 'I'm sorry I didn't get this too you before you got all your memories back – it could have been fun. But, you know how it is with crime rings, right? Those goblins just can't let bygones be bygones…'

Holly watched the exchange with amusement. Apparently Artemis decided to respond solely with a cognising nod of his head. His attention seemed to be more focused on the badly wrapped object he now held. Holly watched him tear back one corner with great deliberation, smile faintly, and pocket it.

Tuning back into the conversation at hand, Holly realised Mulch was still rambling about his misadventures. She decided she better stop Mulch before she had to arrest him. Foaly did her job for her.

'Are we going to step through the portal, or just stand around all day listening to the convict?'

'Careful there Foaly, you're starting to sound like old Julius.' Mulch waddled over to the shimmering entrance. 'Tell him something from me, right? Next time this Fowl business crops up again, tell him I ain't helping unless there's something in it for me. My debts are clear.'

'What debts?' This came from Artemis.

'Pah. Julius thinks I should be grateful he didn't send any LEP officers after me – as if I can't out-tunnel a bunch of Retrieval jocks.'

Mulch poked the portal with exaggerated suspicion. Holly watched in fascination as his finger passed straight through the disc. She'd always been impressed by time-stops. _The last of the ancient magics_. She remembered her transformation. _Or…maybe not_.

She'd asked Foaly to explain the time-stop to her once. He'd gotten into an abstract theory concerning time paradoxes. The whole thing had gone over her head so fast she swore it had whistled. Something about time-stop superiority and timeline integrity. Still, if it worked, there was no use analysing it too much.

Holly directed the two humans through the time-hole, before grabbing Mulch – who was standing at the thinnest edge of the disc and shooting quick looks either side – by the collar and throwing him forward into the portal, belatedly hoping that no one had moved anything inside the stop.

Holly herself took a deep breath and stepped through. Once on the other side, she let it out slowly, while her brain registered her time travel. While she reorientated, she checked to be sure her watch was still working. Even though time travelled onward – if completely estranged – it felt strange to have her watch work in a time _stop._

She looked around her, vaguely astonished like every time she entered a space using a time-portal. It was remarkably like running through a veil of mist only to find yourself standing exactly where you had been. Weird. Foaly assured her that it was even weirder once you knew all the scientific principles it violated. Holly was content to take his word for it.

The first obstacle was the doorway and scanner. This was where Mulch came in. They could bypass the employee security check by tunnelling under the walls and into the lobby.

'Out of the way Mud-people…' Mulch suspended his preparatory crouching to tip an imaginary hat to where Holly stood, unmoved. 'And lady.'

Obligingly, she backtracked to stand with Artemis and Juliet. This time, she kept a little further back, behind the taller humans. When Mulch was some distance gone, they were still standing there. Holly shifted her pack, wondering why she'd shoved wings in at the last moment. Something – she suspected the rudder – was poking her in the pack.

'Get on with it!' yelled Mulch from somewhere in the hole.

Still no one moved.

'No matter how many times I have to it, I will _never _get used to crawling through a recycled tunnel,' declared Holly, pushing down on the edge of the pit, testing for stability. For several feet it dropped vertically into the ground, ending with…Holly didn't think about it. She crinkled her nose in distaste.

'Ladies first,' Artemis said smoothly. Holly rolled her eyes silently at his selective chivalry. She caught Juliet's gaze. The Mud-teen shrugged.

'I've done worse.' With that parting statement, she dropped soundlessly into hole. Soundlessly, that is, until Holly heard her hit the bottom with a squelch, punctuated with an exclamation of disgust.

After ascertaining that Juliet had moved aside, Holly took a deep breath and stepped off the ledge into the muck tunnel. Inside was darkened so completely she could barely see. Holly reached into her own backpack and pulled out a torch. It flickered feebly several times before illumination flooded from the globe. Sighing with relief, Holly handed it to Juliet, who shone it up the tunnel.

'Hey! Watch the light!' Came the irritable reply from further down. 'Dwarves are photosensitive, you know. What are you lot waiting for anyway? Doing tea or something?'

Holly moved sideways as her motion sensors picked up movement above her. A second later Artemis was kneeling beside her, driven to his knees by the impact with the ground.

'Good thing the ground is soft, huh Fowl?' She let her lips form into a lazy grin. She heard his snort but other than that he didn't respond. Her grin simply grew wider. The torchlight bobbed erratically up ahead.

'Hurry up!'

'Probably a good idea,' muttered Holly as she pulled Artemis to his feet, only to 'loose her grasp' and send him face first into the slimy wall of the tunnel. 'If I don't get up there, Mulch'll probably start pilfering treasure.'

She started forward, cautiously, until she was at Juliet's back. For a few minutes they were silent as they navigated through Mulch's twining course. Holly remembered the limestone flourishes on each of the pavers and wondered if the foundation wasn't partly made up of the same thing. As if sensing her doubts, the path began a steady slope to the surface.

She knew when they'd reached it – her fine-tuned ears picked up Juliet's shoes as they scuffed onto the wooden floor. Holly climbed out after the Mud-maid, taking gulps of clear air as she waited from Artemis to climb the incline. When they were all standing around their entrance, Mulch handed Holly three perfectly preserved floorboards. She stacked them into a neat pile, remembering to set a hologram into one of the knots of wood.

That done, she set about surveying the room. A fibreglass model of a brontosaurus skeleton snatched her attention. It towered above her, obviously true-to-life. Or, at least, what the humans thought was true-to-life. Even with her elementary knowledge, Holly could have pointed out some obvious mistakes.

The hall itself was also cavernous, though she scouted only two cameras. Of course, there was nothing here to steal except the thunder lizard. The cameras – as Holly had guessed – pointed to the dual entrances.

Continuing her reconnaissance, Holly reconsidered her use of the word 'cavernous' to describe. Though the antechamber was large, its walls and floor shone with lacer and the ceiling was domed, a large skylight letting light through. Hardly dark and gloomy. And, through the scents of freshly turned dirt, Holly could discern not the damp aroma of a cave, but the unmistakable stench of high-society – a honeyed, sickly sweet smell of something that had began to rot.

Another, more bitter acridity invaded her nostrils. Holly stopped examining the room to find the source. Her eyes settled on Mulch, who was lathering more sunscreen over his skin. Behind him, Artemis stood by an upright map of what was presumably the museum.

Holly walked across to him, giving Mulch a wide berth, and studied it over his shoulder. The whole building seemed like it was designed to confuse anyone who came inside it. Holly wondered if that was the reason for its ridiculous admission fee.

Foaly had once told her that humans continued making Labyrinth like structures not for punishment (which was their only utile purpose), but for recreation. They called them mazes. Apparently, humans would _pay _for the chance to get hopelessly lost.

Which wasn't really surprising when you thought about it. It kind of explained their progress as a race.

Holly punched Artemis lightly on the shoulder. 'Figured this thing about yet?'

'Yes, actually. We're currently in the prehistoric centre.'

Holly punched him again. 'Hence the gigantic skeleton. Have you figured out where the gem is?'

'I have.'

Holly pushed the Mud-boy toward the exit.

'Lead the way then.'

-

They got lost twice.

While Juliet muttered something incoherent about men and directions, Mulch took the more direct approach and asked Artemis if his photographic memory was on the blink. To this, Artemis replied that Holly's punching had disturbed his concentration. To that, Holly punched him. Again.

When they finally reached the _correct _room, Holly examined the diamond before Artemis could touch the casing. It had to be authentic – it was no good staging this mission to come back with a planted fake. At first she couldn't tell if it was the real thing, until she activated the zoom function in her sunglasses, magnifying the tiny circlet on the crown. She smiled in satisfaction. A set of Gnommish characters wound their way around the gold seal.

'How do we get it out?'

'Open the control console and I'll demonstrate.'

Holly crouched beside the black column elevating the case, and ran her fingers down a metallic panel on the side. She examined several imperfections with her zoom vision before finding the keyhole. She inserted a miniature version of the lock-opener she had used on some of her previous missions. Half a second later, the door swung open to reveal a complicated looking set of ports and optic fibres. She scooted sideward to allow Artemis access.

She watched curiously as he removed a pair of tiny clippers from a case and cut three wires. He fed these into a small rectangular device which lit up every time he inserted a wire. A moment passed and it beeped softly. Apparently this was satisfactory, because Artemis connected a cable between this thing and his laptop, which lay open on the floor in front of him.

His fingers moved with agile grace over the keyboard, flipping between several windows and programs.

'I have deactivated the remote alarm, although I can't bypass the maser alarms that have been actuated by unauthorised access. Those were localised actions and I could not decipher their specific control password, only the master code.'

'Which means what?' asked Mulch, who was eying another exhibit. Holly waved her Neutrino in his direction.

'It means that no one knows we're here, but we still have to check for laser beams on the way out,' explained Holly, clicking the appropriate lens into her almost transparent sunglasses.

Immediately the world darkened to a green-black consistency, with sharp neon lines denoting the position of laser beams.

'Mulch. Don't move.' Holly threw a lens to the dwarf, who held it to his eye and rotated his head about. He then proceeded to step cleanly over the beam. Relieved, Holly took three pairs of frames out of her pack, pitching one each to Juliet and Mulch, and handing one to Artemis. He pushed them to the bridge of his nose so they completely covered his vision. He looked around the room once before nodding and pushing them down again.

'The alarm was universal so the beams wouldn't concentrate in any one room. There are likely to be more in the hallways.'

Holly didn't doubt it. It just couldn't be that easy.

Artemis turned back to his laptop and opened another program, manipulating the controls to disable the casing. The front panel of glass slid down into a hidden compartment inside the pedestal. He cast a look toward Holly, his eyebrows raised in silent question. She shook her head.

'I don't think so. You're human, so the magic won't transfer – I'm not being knocked out again. You take it.'

Artemis checked the time before doing so. Six thirty three.

He then reached into the case and lifted the diamond out of its stand. He heard the tiny snap of the filament and checked his screen. The timer had stopped. Artemis made a perfunctory attempt to change the face value of the numbers. They remained impervious to the master code. This did not surprise him.

He could wipe it clean, but that would make it quite difficult to establish an alibi. That was critical. As the sole negotiator, Artemis knew he had to have strong case to avoid being arrested.

Holly passed him a leather string. He threaded it through the clasp and pulled out the package that Mulch had given him earlier. He removed the packaging, almost placing it in the bin before reconsidering – it was probably best not to leave anything at the scene, even non-descript brown paper.

Inside the packaging was a golden disc. Not the copy (which had directed Mulch to the whereabouts of the real coin), but the original. Artemis was glad Mulch had retrieved it for him.

He threaded the thong through the hole in the centre. The diamond made a small clinking noise against the coin as Artemis tied it around her neck. He looked up, his gaze crossing Holly's. Her eyes moved toward the coin for a brief second before being turned elsewhere. She said nothing, but was smiling.

As a group, they retreated back the way they came. As soon as Artemis stepped into the hallway, he knew that their escape would not be made so easily. Four laser beams cut straight through the hall, one at around Butler's head height, another at about his, one at waist height and the last closer to the floor. The gap between it and the floor would be too narrow to enable them to crawl.

They would have to fly.

'Well?' Holly left Mulch and Juliet hovering in the doorway to stand at his shoulder, regarding the beams. 'What now?'

He outlined his plan to Holly, whose pallor slackened a little as he explained her part. When he'd finished, she resembled a wraith. Artemis waited a moment while she took a deep breath and shook her head as if to drive away errant thoughts. He hoped she wouldn't faint.

'Good thing I decided to bring the wings then,' she commented airily, strapping them around her shoulders and rising into the air.

Artemis watched her with apt fascination.

After modifying several variables on her control panel, she proceeded to manoeuvre and correct her position until her shoulders were suspended precariously over the highest beam. The strain on her back was painfully apparent, and her neck was pulled at an odd angle, having to be both clear of the lasers and allow her to keep sight of the control panel.

In one quick motion she straightened her legs, balancing them to the line of her body. For a precarious and eternal second she lay suspended. Her muscles seemed poised – taut – like a diver's moments before plunging off of a high-board.

Then, with an abruptness that made him start, she flicked the joystick. In his mind, Artemis knew that the burst of speed had to be perfectly controlled – there was no other way it would have been possible – but from the sideline, it looked as if the movement was hopelessly erratic. Somehow, she cleared the lasers.

For a moment there was the hush of a collective breath, broken by Juliet's voice.

'You do know,' she began, with a sideward glance above her, 'that I can't do that.'

'Don't stress,' replied Holly. 'It's already covered.' Artemis noted her voice sounded a little giddy.

He watched as she uncoiled a length of her Moon belt, and moved to hover just behind the topmost laser. Stretching her arm over the beam, she carefully lowered the cable until he could take hold of the end, preventing it from swinging through the beams.

Immediately after tying it about his waist, Artemis experienced a strange sensation of the ground gradually slipping out from under his feet. He continued to rise until Holly drew the rope. Using the remainder of his gravity, Artemis swung his legs back until his body was completely pressed to the ceiling. Artemis was able to centre his gravity with both hands (unlike Holly who had to manipulate controls to secure her flight motions), and was also free of a wing-set's added bulk.

He hovered there for a minute while Holly repositioned herself on the other side of the laser field. She then slowly reeled in the remaining cord, winching Artemis forward until he had cleared the lasers. Although suspensive, this manoeuvrer was much less risky than Holly's – Artemis needn't worry about his propulsion or even the narrow gap, only his balance.

Once lowered to the ground, Artemis watched the process repeated twice more as Holly pulled Mulch and Juliet over the network of optical masers. Holly herself stayed perched on an invisible cloud of levity until she had retracted the cable back into the belt. When she landed lightly beside him, Artemis let out a breath that he felt had been caught in his throat throughout the last fifteen minutes.

'Let's _not_ do that again. Ever.' Holly breathed the last word.

'So,' Mulch was rubbing his hands together with glee. 'Onto the other exhibits then?'

Artemis moved aside as Holly aimed a swift kick in the convict's direction.

-

A/N:

Please review! This kind of looks like what happened in EC, what with the stealing from a secure facility; but this is by no means the end this novel tends to Lost Colony-esque from here on in. By that I mean less technological, more magical.

Kim.


	6. The Raven Queen

**Chapter 5**

Rain fell as barely more than a haze over Dublin. The light dust of moisture was enough to make Holly move from inside the air conditioned comfort of Fowl Manor and outside – despite the humidity. The sky was smooth with clouds, a blanket of grey stretching from horizon to horizon, dappled with white.

She lay reclined on a hammock suspended from the two ornate posts that helped support the Fowl's lanai. On the small wood table beside her, the communicator Foaly had given her sat propped up on two novellas, just high enough for her to be able to cast a glance down at the screen without moving her neck.

Despite the weather, Holly was feeling uplifted. Foaly's recalibration of the portal had sent the whole group back in time – so despite entering the museum at roughly six o'clock, Holly had emerged from the time-stop at five thirty. Having an extra half hour in the day did wonders for time management. Of course, it could have been something to do with the fact she had spent that half hour making a fool of Artemis in the most expensive restaurant in Dublin.

She heard footsteps ascending the wooden stairs onto the veranda. She turned her shoulders to face the entrant – or she would have, if the hammock hadn't suddenly pitched sideward. As she struggled to right herself (and the hammock), Holly swore enthusiastically – D'arvit and plenty more besides. This drew equally enthused laughter from her interloper.

'Such colour in your expletives, Miss Short.'

Holly swung to face the speaker – Artemis, of course. He'd changed his suit. Holly didn't blame him; she'd tipped a gravy boat into his lap in her staged furore. The stain hadn't become him.

'Sometimes being a grandstanding jock has its advantages.' Holly peered audaciously at the youth. 'Although, I began running out of options after I over turned the table.'

'I agree. A lying cheat is nothing compared to "an incubus of waking women."'

Holly made a small 'uh-huh' noise as she untangled her legs from the hammock, placing them onto the ground before raising herself into an upright position. She tried for composure, raising her chin defiantly and narrowing her eyes, a smirk appearing on her lips – just before she realised that Artemis was staring at her chest.

'What are you doing?' Holly tried not to shriek the question.

'Looking…'

Holly clenched and unclenched her hands a few times before answering.

'Looking at _what_?'

'Your necklace…' Artemis's face showed an emotion that Holly had never seen there before. It took her a moment to realise that it was confusion.

'What about it?' Holly was convinced she was about to collapse into a fit of hysteria. At least he was looking at the _diamond_ and not… anything else.

'I retrieved and analysed enlargements of both diamonds.' He gestured obliquely at Holly's communicator.

'_You hacked my files?_' Back to the shrieking.

Artemis waved the point aside. 'The Stones are physically identical – which is impossible.'

'If you believe chemistry, then you're right. But if there's magic involved, then it's not impossible at all.' The joy of being able to correct Artemis cut through her neurosis.

Holly unhooked her necklace, and dangled it between them, pulsing it with magic until it glowed a dusky blue. Artemis took the diamond between two fingers, twisting it to refract the light. Holly felt the tension in her shoulders slip a little, softened by the thrall of diamond's glow. She smiled and let go.

As soon as her flesh broke contact with the chain, the glow erupted into a beacon of blinding light. More out of perception than sight, Holly sensed Artemis let go of the stone. She caught it – but that was owed only to her disciplined reflexes. Her hands shook as she fastened it back around her neck, watching the light fade until all that was left to attest to it were the blue-black flecks in her vision.

Holly blinked rapidly to clear them. _What was that all about?_

She looked at Artemis, expecting to see his face composed with the answer. Instead, she saw him staring in bewilderment at his hand, which he held suspended in mid-air. On the tips of his fingers shone the fresh redness of burns. Holly, in a moment of panic, almost rose to get water, before realising that she still had magic.

Automatically, she curled her fingers over his. Feeling him flinch beneath her hand, she focused all her attention on the burns.

'_Heal_.' For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then a wave of indigo magic traced a path down her arm and spread in a spider web over her hand, before disappearing where their skin met.

The smallest of sparks began to flame in the heart of her necklace. Another tiny ember began to glow just out of her normal sight. Her magic-vision, which was now innate, alerted her to it by glowing fiercely. She rose her gaze, and saw that the other diamond – Artemis's – was glowing in reality and not just in her Sight.

Holly became aware that she was still holding Artemis's hand. Just as she collected her thoughts enough to be able to pull her fingers away, she felt the irrevocable pull of magic centre around her forehead –

– and her spirit-self tear away from her body.

_Silence. The sound of her heart seemed loud in her ears. She opened her eyes with great effort, to see only a sphere of light that seemed to encircle her completely. As it faded, Holly opened her magic-sight wide to glimpse at her surroundings._

_She seemed to be floating. Her limbs seem strangely light, as if they weren't part of her – which, she reminded herself, they weren't. The world around her seemed to be blurred, colours merging into one another, their boundaries smudged by whatever magical phenomenon had brought her here. As she watched, the view solidified. _

_Haven._

_But not the Haven she knew._

_The air buzzed with magic, but not the healing magic of the People…something else. Something that stained the ground and the air, clinging to Holly's skin as an oily sheen of sickness and decay. Smirches of black magic stretched for miles along the city, infecting the Eastern Lake and the earth itself. The ground had lost all stability. In her Sight, Holly could see it tearing at the seams, bursting from its core with something contagious. Spreading evil like a disease._

_Holly reached out her awareness to brush against it._

_Air was forced from her, and, despite gasping breaths, she couldn't regain it. _

_She was suffocating._

_She strained against it until her magic burnt with the pain, but it held her firm. And she still couldn't get air into her lungs. Her throat tightened, and she fought the panic rising in her chest._

_Holly made a final, desperate wrench at breathing. The connection strained – and snapped, driving her gasped inhalation from her lungs again. This time when she tried to take a breath, it came. She felt any strength she had left leave her in a rush of numbness. _

_Propelled by something out of her control, Holly moved forward over Haven. A thought came to her through the haze of disorientation…_this had to be connected.

_She curled her fingers around the blue-diamond. Why was she here? This…all of this…it was _wrong.

_This wasn't healing magic, the People's magic. This magic was killing magic. She could smell death on it. Not just of the present, but also of the past._

_Holly lifted her head. Above her, she saw a giant bird of prey soaring over the tainted ground._

The Raven Queen…

-

Holly was confused.

The Raven Queen Morgiana – the archetype of the Great War between the People and the Fomorians – and the incursive Black King were two of the last conduits of the Three Protectors. The unaccounted other was a High Priestess, leader of the Druids, who were an race of fairies – now extinct – who dabbled in warrior magic.

_Warrior daughters and warrior magic_, thought Holly. But for all their power, they were not Warlords and did not wield such darkness. They did not work with the black magic being dealt out in Haven. Only the Fomorians had. The Fomorians and the Protector they had stolen then defiled with their own brand of foul magic.

Of course, that Stone (and the two remaining) had supposedly been destroyed. Every fairy knew the myth. In a last effort to appease the gods into swinging the war in their favour, every warrior who took oath to the People joined as one legion to face the Fomorian Army and their Warlord. It had not been thought to be a wise move – the Army had strong, if traitorous, magic coursing through their blood; magic sold to them by the Mud-men in exchange for power over the fairies.

The legend tells that in the midst of this last battle, the magic that the Protectors provided became ridden with dark magic. Every fairy-mind had already withdrawn by the time the link shattered. Any remaining minds that had stayed linked, including those of the Fomorian Army in its entirety, were paralysed in the dying mesh of the Protectors' ley-lines and poisoned along with the Stones themselves. Each of the conduits were tied to the Stones so tightly that they had no choice but to die with them. The Raven Queen became a martyr. The Fomorians had perished also – but not before defiling the People's most precious talismans.

Humans had made use of the Protectors in their own way. Using the control gained from the manipulation of the Fomorians, the Mud-men had made three decrees: that iron-cast swords – the same that the People had helped them craft – would become anthema to all of fairy blood; that no Fairy would cross the threshold of a human dwelling on their own merit; and that every Fairy would be at mercy to their spoken word. They then bound the People's magic and drove them underground.

Objects of such treachery and betrayal could never be used, even after purification.

As such, the Three Protectors had been burnt in a supernatural fire, their earthen ashes given to the wind over the king tides, so no element could hold their rotten power hostage.

Their destruction had been complete and recorded; scribed by dozens of scholars and nobles who had witnessed the event. But that didn't change the fact that one was hanging around her neck. And it didn't look destroyed to her.

'Why not just get rid of them?' asked Holly aloud, her fingers hovering over the keys of her communicator. 'Why lie?' _Yes. Why lie_? A small voice taunted her.

'Would _you_ destroy them, Holly?' Artemis asked, picking up her train of thought effortlessly. 'Would you destroy something to powerful? Something that can be used?'

'Yes,' that was said with conviction. 'Besides, the magic hasn't been used for millennia…'

Artemis seemed unperturbed by this. 'How would the power have been removed from the Stones?'

Holly shrugged, continuing to scroll absently, her eyes skimming the text on screen. 'Draining. Like pain-relief, that healers use to help their patients.'

'Yes, but where did it _go_?' Holly shook her head at the question, uncomprehending. Artemis took the liberty of explaining. 'Even the pain doesn't just vanish, the healer has to feel it before it dissipates.'

Holly didn't ask how he knew that. 'It – I don't know – disappeared … evaporated, or something.'

'Evaporated…' An expression stole across his face, and he closed the encyclopaedia with a resonate snap. Holly didn't interrupt. She had seen that look before.

'Water doesn't disappear when it evaporates,' Artemis began, a moment later. 'It just transcends into a form that is less noticeable than in liquid state.'

Wondering where this was going, Holly abandoned her attempt to contact Foaly and gave her full attention to the teenager. 'What are you saying?'

'That the power didn't disappear. It was more … recreated.'

'As what?'

'Another power.'

'Is that possible?' Even as her heart skipped a beat, Holly's suspicious nature forced her to narrow her eyes.

'It _is_ a logical argument.'

Holly remained unconvinced.

'Why not just destroy it with the Stones themselves?'

Artemis smirked in reply. 'The first law of thermodynamics – energy can be neither created nor destroyed.'

Holly sighed, running her hands through her hair, pushing it away from her face. Artemis was impossible. Impossible, but right – of course. Magic was, indeed, often governed by physics, despite that human scientists shunned it for the very reason that it seemed to violate their precious laws of nature.

'Legend says the Protectors were created by blood magic – transferral of magical energy.' Holly paused, delayed by the compound effort of having to remember both science _and _history lessons. 'Meaning that if the Stones were allowed to release their energy, all the magic would dissipate into the earth –' Holly faltered, muted by realisation. _Including the Fomorian magic…they all would have died. _Her mind supplied the crucial phrase even if her voice couldn't.

'What I don't understand,' Artemis mused, his gaze sliding from Holly to somewhere outside the window, 'is how the Fomorians took control of the Stone during the Bronze Age when – according to all sources – they had never been successful before.'

'They stole it,' Holly said, trying to appear nonchalant. She was careful to leave a pause between the question and her answer. Being some sort of psychologist in his own right, Artemis might interpret a rushed response as deceit. Which it was. But that was beside the point.

'Yes…from the Queen of the fauns, if I recall correctly.' She bowed her head in concurrence. Artemis still frowned. 'Why would this attempt be successful? Surely any Fomorian would stand out if they tried to enter a city, especially one guarded by a herd of goat-people.' He turned his gaze on Holly. 'They are giants, after all. It would be much like a human doing so.'

'Maybe it was a spy.' Holly tried to infuse her tone with careless speculation. 'Or maybe they bribed someone.'

Artemis finally accepted her answer with a satisfied nod. Thanking Frond, Holly remembered a saying coined by him – the best deception lies in truth. Apparently the humans had a similar saying. Maybe they weren't as perverse as they seemed. Although, it wasn't likely.

She noticed, with a start, that Artemis was staring at her expectantly. For a moment Holly stared just as adamantly right back. Until she realised he'd asked her a question and wanted her to answer. From then on, Holly made agreeing sounds and monosyllable responses in appropriate places, trying to hide that her thoughts were elsewhere. Very much elsewhere.

As much as she felt guilty about keeping the secret of the human Betrayal from Artemis, Holly reasoned she would have felt even more so had she told him. The Betrayal was an ancient tabu – the fairy swastika. A reminder of things that didn't want to be remembered. The Betrayal had divided them irrevocably. Artemis couldn't have understood…his People hadn't lived through it, hadn't seen what pain it had caused them.

It was Unforgivable, and it shamed them to the point that it had become Unspeakable.

So Holly stayed silent.

-

'Atlantis?'

Artemis nodded, despite the purely skeptic look on Holly's face.

'Our Atlantis has nothing in common with your ruinous myth. You think we'd be stupid enough to sink a city in front of the whole of the Minoan empire?'

She looked as if she feared for his mental health. If she did, she had no reason to. After learning of his connection to the People, Artemis had retaken the Mensa IQ test to be sure that the mind wipe hadn't hand any adverse effects. He scored higher than he had before…which was saying something.

'I am relatively sure that you would not. But what I am equally sure of is that Atlantis is no myth.' As he said this, Artemis looked into Holly's eyes, and knew that he wasn't wrong. 'I have uncovered the story of a city, near Crete, which – whether the fairies sank it or not – was definitely swallowed up by the sea. Unless you want to enlighten me of why the fairies wanted it to look that way?'

The elfin Captain raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if seeking divine guidance, before relenting.

'The City of the Druids, Râet, was set up on the costal island bearing the same name. Before the – before the fall of the empire, the Druids had bartered with the Cretan fisherman, offering advice on weather-lore in exchange for part of their harvests.' She paused, and seemed to be lost in thought. Artemis urged her on with a slow nod. She sighed, and continued. 'There was an earthquake. Magical in origin. Râet was washed away in the tsunami.'

_Or_, _so_ _it_ _seems_, he thought.

Artemis thought back to the map Foaly had gloated about in Haven. His photographic memory readily supplied a mental picture of the map, complete with the exact shade of green that the discs of power had shone. Tracing his mind over the curve of each, Artemis decided the rough epicentre of the last power signature _could_ be centred around southern Greece… but if the city had been destroyed it would have been unlikely that the Stone would have remained untouched by the currents in the Mediterranean.

'Is there any way the Stone could have protected this city?'

Holly shrugged. 'That is what it was made to do. I suppose even in its dying throes the diamond could have reverted back its base purpose and preserved the city in some sort of power-shield. Of course, some, if not all, of the protected area would have flooded…' She trailed off into silence, her voice minacious.

Artemis took up the silence with his own thoughts. 'Probes have discovered a mountain range on the bed of the Cretan Sea. It's said to be impossible to navigate. Do you think you can?'

She stared at him candidly, a vixenish malicious smile curving her lips.

'Only one way to find out.'

As she finished that rather ominous sentence, another earthquake shook the ground under Dublin, accompanied by an evil warding hand gesture from Holly and most of the fairy People under Ireland.


	7. Here Be Monsters

**Chapter 6.**

Holly manoeuvred the mini-sub through the ghostly peaks far below the water's surface. The beam lights swept across the mountainous seabed, sending shafts of light onto the graveyard of peaks. It was strange to be flying through mountains under water instead of over land; where there should have been the resonance of the slipstream was a solemn quiet, any sound muted by the leagues of water on all sides. Everything was darker – a murky blue-green which was almost black where the versants fell into shadow or disappeared down into the depth of the ocean.

While she entered rough co-ordinates into the computer, Holly thought about the Druids. This was one assignment she'd done willingly in Cadets.

If the Star People could be summarised by one legend only, it would be the Legend of the Golden Eye. This Eye was a force – no one had ever agreed what exactly the force _was_ – that supposedly protected the city, forbidding any other than the Druid acolytes to walk beneath its glare. It purportedly measured the power of all under its gaze, allowing in only those who met its satisfaction. But, as had been pointed out to her very recently by a know it all human, it was by no means fool-proof. The fortress had been invaded during the Golden Age by a wizard with such power that he succeeded in hook-winking the Eye into believing he was a Druid. It was this same trickery that Artemis hoped would work for them. Ideally, their gems would emit enough power to fool the Eye into allowing them access to the city.

The air inside the shuttle sub seemed as still as the water outside it. Nothing stirred outside the reinforced shell, and neither of them spoke inside it. Holly almost missed Juliet's incessant chatter about boys, wrestling and clothes, but knew that it would have been impossible for her to have come. For Juliet, the only thing worse than being left behind would have been to come and be left at the Eye because she had no power to fool it with. Or so Butler had convinced them. Besides, it would be better for her to receive her Tattoo this time, rather than be dragged into one of their 'crazy schemes' again.

Holly scanned the screen. For Mud-man technology, this stuff was pretty good. The screen was fed visuals from a cluster of sensors on the hull of the ship. Heat, light, sound, movement detectors, each fixed at an individual and independent station, fed Holly the information on screen.

Something beeped outside the range of the main sweepers, caught by an auxiliary movement sensor. Holly tapped a few buttons on the control panel, bringing up the radar. As the green bar swept across the circular disc on screen, a new picture appeared. It was made up of a matrix of lines – a 3D representation of what the computer was 'seeing'. Whatever its scientific name was, it looked like a common sort of deep sea dweller – its fins were long and mangled, apt representations of sea weed. Holly guessed that they were lures for any assortment tiny fish – like those that had been attracted by the ship's lights.

Another bleep sounded from the speaker, and Holly rapped the keyboard again. The computer began to scrawl a linear picture of the newest creature. It was another dweller, this time more comical – two pincers weighed down its front end, forcing it to swim while pitched dramatically forward. The creature's legs were thick and segmented, connected by a fleshy skin, making it look like a deformed bird. The computer re-animated the their likely use – if bent and thrust forward, then spread and dragged backward, these unlikely ventral fins could be used as directional propulsion. The tail, reminiscent of that of a crayfish, moved vertically in a large sweeping motion, flexing and falling. Covering the creature's broad back was a shiny carapace, a hardened shield to protect it from predators.

In its entirety, it looked somewhat like a lobster with overgrown claws and webbed legs. Relatively harmless.

At that moment a thunderous noise erupted.

It flooded from the speakers until Holly could barely breathe, let alone think. Through the pain from behind her ear drums, Holly found the switch controlling the audio-system. She hammered it into the console, and the speakers cut. Which didn't help much. The noise forged right through the submarine's supposedly 'sound-proof' shell.

A harsh expletive joined the racket, as well as Artemis's whispered realisation.

'Leviathan…'

'Levia-what?'

Suddenly, the thundery dissonance subsided, and Holly heard Artemis's intake of breath. Before he could release it, Holly was thrown sideways into him, the whole shuttle keeling into verticality.

Seizing the controls with both hands, she managed to wrest the ship upright, firing two torpedoes. Both connected with something; the monster or the mountainside, Holly wasn't sure. A violent movement alerted her to the cloud of sand rising off the seabed, left in the wake of something large and fast.

As it cleared from view, that something emerged from the shadow.

It had to be more than fifteen times the size of the sub. They could have dropped it down the E1 chute and it still would have scraped against the sides. It was _huge_. And so were its pincers. Holly knew that they could have crushed through the reinforced hull with absolutely no problem whatsoever.

But what really made her panic reflex rise were its eyes…they shone red with frenzied rage, and, beneath that, a dark intelligence. One even Holly could recognise as some sort of deformed evil.

She forced herself not to dwell on that panic for long. As much as she would have liked to initiate a time stop, chastise herself for being so careless and think up a less insane course of action, Holly had more important issues on hand right at that moment. Like avoiding the collision course with Artemis's Leviathan and the mountain that had suddenly sprung up before them.

Jerking the joystick as far right as it would go, Holly felt the ship bank, scraping its base on the face of the mountain. She released the control stick, but it didn't re-centre like it should have. It was jammed in that position. _D'arvit. _

For a moment, the ship righted itself … before careening into the side of the mountain and bouncing backward, ramming Holly's forehead onto the control panel a split second before snapping her skull back into the headrest.

Then, accompanied by a resonating _thump_, every screen was black.

No steering. _No_ _light beams_. This was not something that she was prepared for. A one-on-one with a mythical monstrosity, she could handle. A one-on-one with a mythical monstrosity _without_ steering or light was another matter entirely.

'Holly! The thrusters!' Artemis had regained his composure.

_About time he stopped gawking at that thing and decided to be of some assistance._

Holly punched the left thruster, spinning the ship to face the Leviathan. Or what she hoped was the Leviathan and not another mountain. There wasn't a real lot to differentiate either from the other or even those from the unknown shadows surrounding her, especially without the light beams.

A glimmer of something magical appeared in her higher sight, and before she could register what it was, her own magic traced a sole spark across her forehead, healing a gash leaking blood down her temple.

With that, her vision flooded with gold and white.

As the flash ebbed, Holly realised she could see the mountains. It was as if the hull of the ship had dissolved. She couldn't even see the controls in her hands, although she could feel them. The mountains, however, stood out in sharp relief in her magic sight, as if they radiated incredible heat.

The Leviathan, too, shone with magical energy.

'You mean the _Druids_ made these mountains?' Holly tried to focus through her shock, and the shuttle swam back into view.

Her grip on the crooked joystick tightened. Fight or flight response. And – as much as she loathed admitting it – she couldn't fight. No way. If that creature had magic as well as strength, they'd be the losers in any forthcoming battle. Which meant it was time to put her shuttle skills to use.

Carefully redistributing power, Holly fired another three torpedoes in the Leviathan's direction and hit the thrusters. The ship executed a perfect one-eighty degree turn to face a solid wall of rock.

Holly pushed down on the forward thrusters, sending them straight toward the mountain – it was their only chance of getting out of the shuttle alive. For a second she wondered why Artemis had just choked, when she realised that, from his point of view they were rocketing around a mountain range without any visuals.

It must have looked a little reckless.

Forgetting that for the minute, Holly reigned in her focus – she'd need every bit of it to pull this off. Or even come close to pulling it off, in fact.

In front of her, there was a slight opening between two impenetrable shelves of rock. Slight mind – nowhere near big enough for a monstrous creature of the deep, but maybe just maybe for a mini-sub. Especially one piloted by the first officer ever in the LEP's history to reach Captaincy with a perfect shuttle record.

Flipping the vessel onto its side, Holly lodged the edge of the sub into the gap between the mountains, making the whole cabin shudder with impact. Forcing the control stick to lock forwards now, she drained every last dyne of force into the forward thruster and leaned on the power.

For an infinitesimally long moment nothing happened. Then, with a raucous _crack_ and a silent cheer from Holly, the rock gave and crumbled into the depths of the sea. As the roar of the thrusters quietened, Holly heard the echoing screeches of the Leviathan as it slammed itself once, twice, and a third time into the narrow opening in the mountain rock. Each time, the whole thing shuddered in response, but didn't give.

After a few minutes of hushed breathing, Holly dared to let out a sigh of relief. The water was still again, no movement from either side.

'We made it…' Artemis breathed and Holly thought he sounded just a little too surprised.

'What made you think we wouldn't?'

Brushing a strand of dark hair back from his forehead, Artemis gave her a look of comical disbelief. 'It was a contest between that we had no searchlights or steerage and that we were being hunted by a biblical monster.'

Holly leant back in her seat without answering, merely smirking in giddy relief. Her fingers deftly programmed the ship to auto pilot before entering two sets of co-ordinates. The first was the location of the Leviathan – somewhere to avoid in the future. The second set corresponded to the exact location of the third and last Stone – a glimmering beacon Holly's magical Sight.

She kept her vision fixed on that spot as the ship glided over the mountainous terrain, the glimmer growing steadily into a ball of light. After some minutes of silence from the control panel, the topography device bleeped tiredly. Turning the cameras, which had now conveniently flickered back into life, Holly saw that far below them a large chasm had split a flatter section of seabed into two, complete with jagged edges. Feeling the pull of magic from deep in the heart of the canyon, she guided the vessel down into it.

For sometime afterward, Holly navigated the ship in silence – first through the canyon, and then into a long passage that was darker even than the mountain range above them. It narrowed dramatically and only the proximity sensors stopped them from crashing into the sides.

Soon, thankfully, the tunnel began to widen again, sloping upward and out into some sort of cavern. The craft floated on atop the currents for a moment, the nose breaking water with a small splash, before the body ran aground with the scraping sound of metal against rock.

Letting her vision settle into the physical spectrum again, Holly looked over at Artemis. He was sitting very still with his eyes closed, his breath coming deeper and in a rhythmic pattern. Meditation? Holly laughed softly. Only a human like Artemis Fowl could meditate when they were about to save the world.

'Hey!' Holly nudged his chest with the flat of one palm. 'Coming?'

He opened his eyes slowly, taking in the surroundings before giving her an answering nod.

Opening the hatch, Holly breathed in the dank air. Even that seemed fresh after the stuffiness inside the cabin. Diving neatly off the top of the submarine, she swam a few strokes before setting her feet on the ground. As she waded through it, the cool, achromatic water fell from her shoulders and torso as a fine spray, dispelled by her water-proof suit.

Artemis behind her, Holly scrambled up a slight incline before stepping away from the water. She then turned back, pulling Artemis out and up onto the ledge to stand beside her. She straightened, her gaze landing on the towering mass of the submarine; it seemed to her like a dark shellfish suckered to the rock face. Waves battered against its hull, trying in vain to pull it back out into the tunnel. Holly felt remarkably like that – a futile current trying to push against a cyclonic destiny that had been hundreds of years in the making.

'Coming?' She repeated, turning back to face Artemis. She gestured to the rear wall where another tunnel – steeper and rougher – had been carved into the rock face. It rose unrelentingly into the dark until it became swallowed by it.

He just nodded again.


	8. Enterances

**Chapter 7.**

A stone arch spanned the city's entrance.

Perched, almost precariously, in the centre of this bridge, was a plinth with three hooked projections, each spaced equally around the annular base. They reached up to, but never touched, what Artemis could only guess was the Golden Eye.

The Eye. A single orb, hovering high atop the plinth but never resting on it. It didn't glow as so much as burn a dark golden radiance over the whole city. Veins of richer gold spread and ebbed like ink over the surface, pulled toward a single mar and propelled away again. It was within this aperture of stormy colour that the pupil shone, like a black beetle on a beach of yellow sands.

Its gaze scuttled restlessly. It roamed over the etched stone that stretched from the mouth of the cave, to either side and out onto a pier. The pier stretched out into a harbour, where its surface was buffed by waves. Beyond that a swirling grey fog was thickened in the air until nothing beyond it could be seen.

At both sides, obtruding towers anchored ends of the arch to the smooth, curving walls of rock encapsulating the city. The towers were not complete in themselves, rather moulded from the surrounding rock until it looked as if they had been melted and then built into place. Atop each, a large shield acted as both an ornamental piece and a place for some theoretical watch guard to use as a battlement in a time of siege.

The swinging iris of the Eye didn't pay any particular notice to them. As Artemis approached the edge of the stone floor, it swung toward him, studied for a second, and continued on. He came to conclude that should he and Holly step out from the shadows of the cave, it would not be so apathetic.

Beside him, Holly was also crouched in the soil, her hand skimming just above the hieroglyphs imprinted in the rock. She muttered something under her breath, before uttering another, louder, oath, to which Artemis took as a bad sign.

'Okay…' Holly stood, and Artemis rose too. She spoke to his answered question. 'It basically says, "if thee ain't an all-powerful Druid and thee steppeth onto that there pier, then the Eye shall smite thee."'

'Charming.'

'I'll say.'

She craned her neck to see out into the fog, her gaze reaching past reality and into what might lie beyond. Artemis had no such reservations. He was almost sure that they were about to be "smote" as Holly had just carefully articulated. But, as always when his extrapolations returned a negative result, he kept quiet. No need to stress about something that might not occur. Even if the chance of it not occurring was tending to zero on the probability scale.

Holly shuffled forward slightly to dig her toes into the miniature bevel of stone and soil. Artemis, taking her lead, also moved forward, meeting her eyes as he did so. A tense second passed, before they stepped forward.

As soon as the soles of their boots touched the stone, the Eye rotated violently, fixing its full attention to their progress. Apart from that nothing much else happened. Artemis felt like this whole thing was a little anti-climatic. Was it too much to ask for an explosion?

_Just wait…_a pessimistic voice whispered into his ear, _Certainly, when this 'Eye' burns you alive in your flesh, you'll have plenty of explosive force to admire. Even your brain impulses will bloom as they fade, like the supernova of a dying star… as your vision tunnels, and you simultaneously have a heart attack from the shock of pure fire rushing through your veins, you will have an explosion of your own…_

Artemis shook his head, and quickened his pace to catch up with Holly, who was already half-way across the platform, nearing the pier. She stopped at the edge again, and he caught up with her. Holly reached over, grabbing a handful of his sleeve in her hand.

'Are you sure this will work?'

Artemis said nothing – because nothing was ever certain anymore. Instead, he extended his arm to her in reparation of surety. She raised her eyebrows dubiously at the gesture, her eyes holding a dim flicker of customary derision.

'Holly, don't be childish at a time like this.' Artemis chided, reaching deep for the last vestiges of arrogance left to him. Even if one is a genius, arrogance in hard to find when one might be about to die. Artemis had to be commended for his efforts.

It worked, or as much as it could. Holly glared, and grabbed his forearm awkwardly, and Artemis closed his hand over her arm too.

_On anyone else_, Artemis decided, _even on Juliet, that glare would look even more childish._ But somehow, for an LEP Captain with a smiting hook in her own right, it only made her seem more dangerous.

'You will have to become accustomed to this, you do realise, if we are going to reach the Stone,' he said, pointing with his chin towards where they were clutching each other.

Artemis was shamelessly procrastinating now. The pier looked even less enticing than it had a moment ago. But, nonetheless, he still made sure that Holly thought he was jibbing her. Her hand tightened in understanding, as if she knew he was stalling.

He frowned inwardly – she shouldn't have been able to discern the true motive in his words. After all, there had been truth in them, if not a truthful intention. For the Stone to bond to either one of them exclusivelywould mean a defeat of both their purposes – and the only way to force it to make a dual connection was through constant physical contact.

And again with the procrastination.

Artemis tried to catch Holly's gaze, but she stared defiantly out into the fog, her eyes never leaving some imagined horizon.

They stepped simultaneously forward.

Artemis took a gasping breath, feeling the keen, searching eye of the orb lock onto the crown of his head. He choked, or he would have, had he had any air left to choke with. The hairs on the back of his neck rose, as did the ones along his arms, pricking at his skin like thousands of tiny ant bites. Instantaneously, Artemis found the breath he'd been searching for, and the sensation of suffocation reversed – his lung filled with air until he thought they would burst, a taut pain shooting from his heart to his nerves.

He heard Holly scream. In the shadows of his mind – where reason still held a delicate reign over mindless pain – he knew that she wasn't the only one.

He felt something sweep through him, pausing about his forehead and heart, before regaining momentum and flooding his sight.

For the longest second, his vision was a swirling mass of gold fading to white, before his vision cleared and the dull grey landscape of fog re-appeared.

_He hadn't died._

Beside him, Holly's knees buckled. He turned and caught her by instinct, holding her weight easily until she regained her balance. As she opened her eyes, Artemis caught a glimpse of white hot pain lingering there in the midst of the warm hazel. Then it faded. In its place, a consuming terror that took Artemis by surprise.

Then she punched him.

Which didn't surprise him nearly as much. He'd known her long enough to realise her reflex reactions to pain.

'Oh, gods...'

Artemis glanced at Holly. At first, he thought that her curse had been in empathy; a theory quickly dispelled by the removed look in her eyes. Something else was wrong.

'Holly?' He moved so that she was starting directly into his eyes, but she seemed to be looking through rather than into them.

'Artemis?' Her gaze didn't waver, and she seemed to be speaking from far away. 'Oh gods, Artemis… they're – they're killing Haven…'

And then she fainted.

It took roughly half an hour for Holly to wake again. By that time, the fine spray of the mist had soaked them both through, but Artemis didn't dare move forward, or even back. He had been staring into the strange, bright water when her eyelids began to jitter, and, finally, open.

Artemis was just about to warn her to keep still when she sat bolt upright.

'Where…' Her eyes still weren't focused

Artemis interrupted, 'What do you remember?'

She blinked, and closed her eyes briefly. 'The Eye scrying us then… then Haven…dark…dying, ripped apart by those…those…_things…_' She spat the last word with such vehemence that Artemis felt his blood rush with adrenaline. Despite anything, her disgust seemed to clear her mind.

'What happened?' She turned to face his, her gaze steady, glinting with her usual showy certitude.

'You fainted,' Artemis replied, keeping his voice mild. 'Can we continue?'

Holly bolted to her feet, while Artemis rose more languidly. When they began to walk again, Holly's steps were measured, but unsteady, like she expected she would have to take flight any minute. It would have been possible – the wings strapped to her back certainly could have enabled her that.

'Haven's in trouble,' she remarked after some minutes of silence, as they walked through the fog, a thin raised path all that separated the cuffs of their pants from the water. Her voice was steady, and her gait had quietened; now the only things that betrayed her were her eyes, which gleamed with a kind of resigned sadness that Artemis couldn't make anything of.

'How? From what?'

Still, she her voice didn't falter. 'The Fomorians.'

'The Fomorians? Didn't –'

'Not the Fomorians exactly…more…more their memories.' Holly's voice hardened as she found the word, and she let out a bark of laughter. 'We kill them and they still haunt us.'

Another span of silence, and Artemis realised that they had been walking for some time. He hadn't realised it – in fact, he'd hardly noticed the time passing. It was as if this fog had cut them of from the normal passing of time. The closest thing Artemis could equate it to was the sensation of being inside a time-stop. It was knowing that outside the shell of stillness, wind still blew, clouds were blown by it, and time generally moved on, but not feeling it.

He slowed and halted, another realisation jerking him to a stop. He could barely feel his feet. Where before the raised edge had kept the water from his shoes, they were now soaked through. Holly's combat boots as well. Both of them had somehow ventured off the pathway and into the bitingly cold water. Worse, he didn't know where exactly which direction the path _was_. Or even if they had actually left it or if it had simply been swallowed up by the water.

Holly obviously hadn't realised their error, and continued walking. As Artemis ran after her, the _splash_ of the water oddly muted by that same mysterious fog, he noticed something else. The water was getting deeper. It was now at least half a centimetre higher than it had been. This exact measurement was easy to discern – wherever the water touched, Artemis felt numbness. His could not longer feel much of his ankles, or even see them for that matter. The water covered them and was curiously solid and darker.

'Ack!' Artemis guessed Holly had just figured out their dilemma. Strangely, her voice carried easily over the distance, while the sound of her feet stamping against the rock floor was still muffled. This distorted Artemis's sense of space even more.

'What's going o–'

Artemis saw, near at the same second she did, what made Holly stop. In the cloudy distance, on what might have been the horizon if everything hadn't been so uniformly grey, was a bobbing light. It blinked in and out of existence with an eerie kind of pattern that remained just out of Artemis's comprehension, like almost everything else in this misty ocean. If Holly hadn't been gaping fixedly at the exact same spot, Artemis would have probably thought he was seeing things, or going insane.

Enchanted, Artemis felt himself being pulled into that direction like some sort of magnet toward a pole. Almost of their own according, his feet stumbled over one another to obey the silent command to walk forward. He reached level with Holly, and passed her, wondering idly why she wasn't following.

Seemingly, this thought answered itself and he tumbled prostrate into the water. The cold stung him like so many barbs, and Artemis pulled his arms under him, raising his torso from the water. For a moment, he simply lay there, wondering why exactly he had been following a blinking light into an anonymous mist.

Behind him, Holly seemed to be throwing a tantrum.

'Go away! Be gone, scum of the water! Be gone!'

As he watched, she kicked the water around her. From beneath it, balls of brightness rose to hover only about a foot off of the surface, making the air around her glow. Holly herself, apparently enraged, was still yelling at them, now in a language he didn't place as Gnommish. She pulled out her Neutrino and the air behind the orbs began to shimmer. The patches of heat-haze coloured and shaped themselves into….

Artemis frowned, and looked closer.

Only where the light touched were they visible. The fog masked them entirely where it swirled past. Through periodic glimpses, Artemis ascertained that they were a deformed kind of sea goblin. Their spines were bent, their stance hunched over further. Their eyes skittered and glittered like water beetles, one sometimes flicking to him, but the other always watched Holly. Their noses were hooked and looked as if they had been repeatedly broken – the skin on their faces and back was stretched thin.

'Daughter…' One of the shadow shapes rasped the word at Holly.

'Don't "Daughter" me, you scum! Get lost!' Holly pressed the trigger on her gun. It hummed and shot unfalteringly at the gremlin. The light was swallowed up by the orb that the creature held in it's gnarled hands.

'Daughter of Morrigan, Daughter of Danu…'

Its voice had taken on a husky value akin to some sort of prophetic induction.

'Shut the hell up!' The fact her Neutrino didn't affect these things didn't seemed to have quietened Holly's rage or how much she was shooting.

'Daughter…walker of the warrior path…'

'Be…gone…' Holly's words were drowned out by the orb's humming.

'No harm wish we upon you! Follow!'

She laughed.

'Follow you? To my death!'

'Kill you not would we...'

'No, just lead me to that Fate at the gates to the Spiritlands!'

'Yes! Lead you to the Spiritlands will we! For there must you go!'

'Don't threaten me!'

'Daughter …'

'Be gone, in the name of Danu, _be gone!'_

Holly screamed the last phrase. As she did, her hands became wreathed with fire. Flame burst from her fingers, enclosing the globe. A screech of pain echoed off invisible walls as if the gremlin, not just its lantern, was being burnt away. As the sound faded, so did the creature form, until nothing was left but mist where it had stood.

'Holly?'

In response, she kicked the water so it arched over Artemis's feet, now that he was upstanding. She turned and glared into the mist, challenging any lights to appear. When she was satisfied, she stalked into the mist, and Artemis had no choice but to follow her. Tense silence closed in on him more than the mist itself. Holly's apparent anger and his own incomprehension thickened the silence until he couldn't find words to pierce it with. In his hesitation, Holly did it for him.

'They lure travellers into the darkness. They…' She faltered, suffocated by the mist.

'Kill?' Artemis found his voice.

Holly shook her head. 'They torture their victims, eating their hearts…' She paused, and swallowed. 'They are brilliant healers, keeping their victims alive until they go insane. Then they leave them, lost in their bog, to die of their own accord.

'So they weren't lying…'

'They can't.' He sought her gaze, but she parried.

'Then –'

'Please. I don't want to talk about it.'

Another stretch of silence.

Soon, they were wading through waist high water, dark and dense, rotten honey without any sweetness. Artemis was still following Holly, knowing she had no idea where she was going. He was aware of her tempestuousness, and didn't comment, especially when he had no other viable suggestion than to forge into the ostensibly endless mist like they were doing.

Soon, something, not a light but more a blurred shape, breeched the endless void of nothing. The water level slowly began to drop away. Where the icy water had touched it, Artemis's skin erupted into waves of tingling and pricking, driving sensation back into his limbs.

In front of him the rock rose into an island. The sand rose into a hill, then flattened out before some large and dark. Artemis climbed half-way up a slight incline and collapsed there. As he lay there facing a sky as grey as everything else, his body was wracked with shivers. They coursed through him, making his teeth chatter and his eyes sting. Artemis tried to be thankful – they meant he wouldn't become hypothermic – but couldn't.

A thundery roar brought him quickly to his feet again, and scrambling backward, all the while witnessing something spectacular.

The mist had begun to swirl, forming into a funnel far out into what was becoming a real horizon. The water, as shallow as it was, trembled with suppressed energy as the tornado gained momentum, assimilating more of the fog into the vortex. Wind whipped around him, and to his side he saw Holly grab onto the sleeve of his shirt. For a terrifying instant, Artemis thought it would simply lift them into the air and fling them against the rocky outcrop at their backs.

Just as suddenly as it had began, the vortex folded onto itself and disappeared, the wind settling back onto the water. A clear line separated the vast lay of water from that of the sky, not longer grey but a dusky pink, the colours of sunset. Artemis looked further above him where the sky was tinged blue-black, and studded with diamond stars.

He looked down to the horizon, noticing a large black shape shadowing the water. He turned to see what cast it.

A wall of jagged rock rose above him – completely vertical, probably unclimbable. He reached out a brushed his hand against it. The surface was rough but flat, silvery mosses clinging to the surface. When he touched them, they withdrew into the rock.

Artemis sank into the damp sand, beside Holly. She didn't look up, her hands busy constructing a make-shift hearth. He almost expected her to ask for matches, but instead she held her hand flat over it, her palm facing the sand, and blew through the gaps in her fingers.

Sparks, then tiny flames, rained down from her fingertips, catching the cone of sticks alight and threading heat into the cool breezes. Artemis stared. He hadn't known that Holly had elemental magic…

She laughed. Artemis raised his eyebrows, and she threw her hand across her face to hide her redoubled laughter. Her slight frame leant sideways a little, scattering the black stones beside her, sending some into the water.

'I can't believe – can't….' Holly breathed out deliberately, and continued more steadily. 'You're impossible, Artemis.'

Artemis peered through the flames. Her eyes were dancing, glinting in the firelight, his gaze sweeping his face, as if trying to figure out what he was all about.

'I mean, you take all of this–' she gestured with one hand to the endless ocean, 'like it's normal, like you see it everyday, and I make a little fire–' her fingers wriggled in the direction of the flames, 'and you – you…'

She stood and brushed the sand off her pants. Reaching around the pile of rocks, she pulled her wings free of their supplies, and strapped them around her torso and shoulder, adjusting straps and flicking switches.

'I'm going to fly the perimeter.' The wings began to hum quietly. Holly nodded, and pressed down a large red button. The control panel blinked with every colour, and the humming intensified for a moment, while Holly opened the thruster, rising a few feet into the air.

'If I'm not back in half an hour, then something's eaten me.' She gave him a brilliant smile as she said it. 'Don't do anything foolish.'

_Foolish?_ Artemis wondered idly as she flew into the shadows. _I'm a genius. To 'do anything foolish' would be mildly ironic – after all, only fools do foolish things… _

An hour later and the fire still swayed in the slight breezes coming from over the seas. Artemis scanned the horizon again, again finding no signs of land. Behind him, he heard the dull hum of a machine. It rose, coming closer. It cut without provocation a minute or two later, and he heard instead footsteps on the sand.

'I'm hungry.'

'I thought you had a dinner appointment with a titan?'

'Shut up.'

The wings landed beside him with a thump, sand rising off the ground like dust. Artemis turned his eyes away from the fire and waited for his eyes to adjust to the light. The darkness brightened around the edges, allowing him to see the scowl he knew was on Holly's face.

'It's a wall. A walled city with no gate.' The fire flicked shadows over her, obscuring her expression.

'Surely…' Artemis didn't ask how the Druids had entered the structure. Holly couldn't know the answer anymore than he did. Nonetheless, he asked another question for ward off the inevitable conclusion for a little longer. 'Can we fly over?'

'Fly?' Holly looked at her wings. 'It's doubtful. I flew closer and the power meter began to dim.'

'Coincidence?' Artemis hardly needed the shake of her head. He knew enough not to believe in coincidence anymore. Not when there was magic involved.

The moon had risen in the sky.

He saw Holly's gaze attracted to it like a moth to a flame, and found his own drawn to the fire itself. Fire always fascinated Artemis. It was neither liquid nor solid, never totally one colour. In his more fanciful moments, he almost credited it with life. It certainly wasn't dead. It seemed more so even that some people; it shined with light bright and alive where some seemed to have had the life drained out of them, dull and colourless.

'Centaur.' Holly said suddenly, breaking Artemis's thoughts. She slid off the wood, and braced her elbows behind her so she could face the sky without craning her neck overmuch. He followed the point of elfin fingers to a spot in the starscape above them. 'Isn't that what you humans call it? It's about the only constellation we have in common.'

'The Centaur?' Artemis frowned. 'That cannot be in the sky here, it is a southern constellation.'

Holly shrugged. 'The whole sky is here. Even Dragon's Keep. Lyra, I think you call it. The star Vega is said to be the eye of the dragon, that guards the waiting caves of the rest of their pride.'

'What–' Artemis reconsidered. 'The People have dragon mythology?'

'Yes, but they are dragon serpents – _s'tek_.' Holly looked down from the sky to regard Artemis with interest. 'When they died out, it is said that all who had ever heard their song were compelled to leave their costal homes and flee to the desert – they became Fire People.'

'Fire People? Like the fairies are the People of the Earth?'

'Earth, Sea, Fire Peoples…' Holly said, through a yawn. 'Fairies, Fomorians and Gypsies…'

'Gypsies?' Artemis asked, condensing his question into one word.

'Not as you know them. Desert Gypsies. They travelled, but they are not named for that. Gypsy people came mostly from the Indic continents, where the _s'tek _lived in fresh water reservoirs.'

'Where are they now?'

'The Spiritlands.'

Artemis didn't say anything more.

Soon Holly fell asleep. Something in her hands glinted, reflecting the firelight. He bent down beside her sleeping figure and tried to pry it away from her hands. Her hold tightened, and Artemis squinted to see what it was.

A knife.

It's blade was forged with argent metal not dissimilar to silver, but shining more white than silvery. Contrastively, the maker had gilded the hilt out of black-gold obsidian, warm to touch.

He had read in the Book about these knives. Each fairy, at birth, was given an ornate dagger. They were to be used both for drawing blood and to perform more mundane tasks. This was meant to be a metaphorical representation of a true soul – one that would perform glory in blood but also reduce themselves to dirt when their help was required. Each dagger had a rune, unique to the owner. At their death, it was smeared with the ashes of the wielder, and buried with them.

Artemis could see part of the rune on Holly's knife. It was bottom heavy, the base detailing her history and family relations. These markings Artemis ignored, his eyes rising to the main rune – the one that represented her destiny. Her fingers partially covered it, but if he was careful not to wake her…

Something flickered, red and hot, very close to him. He let go of the dagger, twisting around to find the source. Flames had spilt out over onto the sand. Evidently, the fire had escaped its hearth, feeding off the unbound magic flowing from Holly's unconsciousness.

He shook the sleeping elf awake. Her eyes flickered sleepily, then snapped open as she saw the fire.

It leapt forward, racing down a single stretch of sand as if following an invisible trail of kerosene. It climbed the wall behind them, incinerating moss and vines in its path, clinging to the wall just like them. Flattened against the rock by the wind, it spread from the ground to above their head, with at least two arms spans of rock ignited by flame.

A whispered curse reached his ears over the low rush of heat. Both of them stared wide-eyed at the utterly bizarre phenomenon befalling the rock face behind them.

Later Artemis realised he shouldn't have been surprised. After all, he should be used to this sort of thing by now. Here he was standing beside an ocean within an ocean, behind an elf he'd kidnapped and held to ransom, who'd then rescued his father after he'd shot him to save his life… one would think nothing could surprise this boy.

Then again – it's not every day you see fire melting away stone like it is butter. Which is exactly what this fire was doing. Carving away an almost perfect border into the stone, colouring it in with blackness, burning it through, crumbling it beneath red heat…

It took Artemis a moment. But then his famed intellect kicked into gear and he realised.

_The fire was making a door._

Task finished, it rained from the wall in tiny droplets of flame. In the sand, each flickered, dying slowly, letting their creation bask in light for a few more moments.

The stone was etched on all sides with thick black lines – spirals of Celtic art. Artemis could only glimpse at the scene beyond the door, the sparse light provided by the dying fire now too weak to unveil much of the dark.

Beside him, Holly stepped forward, and traced her fingers over the patterns, before moving to stand on the threshold of the doorway.

'Unbelievable…'

She extended her hand into the dark.

The world flipped in front of Artemis's eyes. He couldn't track his movement…one moment he was staring at Holly and the next at the stars. He hadn't felt himself lift off the ground, or fly through the air and into the water. Which was undoubtedly where he was. The back of his shirt was very cold and wet.

He couldn't see through the bluish splotches in his vision. He tried to stand, but his progress was interrupted by a weight on his chest. It wasn't heavy as such, but seemed to be struggling against him.

Holly, his brain provided.

'Would you mind?' His vision cleared a little, and he saw her face inches away from his, red hair forward over her eyes. 'Removing your chest from mine, I mean.'

Another pain added to the one he had gained when hitting his head.

Climbing out of the water, Artemis shivered, water dripping from the tail of his shirt. In front of him, Holly had drawn her Neutrino, furiously pressing the trigger. She pointed the barrel squarely at the opening in the stone.

_Click. _Fire. _Click. _Fire. _Click. _Fire.

The sounds continued as she approached. She reached about a hand span from the doorway.

_Click. _Pause. _Click. Clickclickclick._

'Holly.'

'What?' She spun around, a little too quickly. Artemis waited until she had relaxed her hold on her gun before answering.

'Is it possible that you simply missed something?'

'Like what?'

Artemis stepped closer to the door, peering not at the opening but the patterns beside. They must have been there for a reason…he pressed his finger into the grove, and it came away with a thin coating of black powder. Brushing aside the ash, Artemis realised what was underneath.

'Could I use your knife?'

Something hit the rock beside him and fell into the sand. Artemis picked it up. Her dagger. He used it to scrape away some of the ash from the channel. There, protected by one magical ward or another, were Gnommish hieroglyphs, embossed in the dusky stone.

Holly leaned in to peer at them, simultaneously levering the knife from his fingers. She scratched away more and more ash until it floated in a fine haze around them. Then she frowned, and began to read, halting every now and again to brush away more ash.

"_Black, am I when you hold me whole,_

_Red, am I when alive,_

_Grey, am I when I die._

_You carry me through, and pass shall you."_

Artemis smirked. He'd always been good at riddles. In fact, he'd already solved this one.

A/N: Hey! I'd really appreciate a review if you've read up until now. Please? Thank you so much if you do.


	9. Riddle Me This

**Chapter 8**

Artemis looked back toward the hearth; the flames had began to die out, the husks of the charcoal stones littering the base. Some still glowed a hypnotising red, while others had remained untouched by the fire, still inky black like the sky above them.

It was then Holly realised.

_Something that every Druid would have to possess…_

They needed fire to uncover the riddle…and they needed fire to solve it!

_Black…red…grey…carry through…_

Holly reached into the fire, grabbing a handful of ash, ember and charcoal – blue sparks flew down her arms and sank into her hands. She poured a little of the charcoal ashes into Artemis's hands, and grinned.

'Am I a genius now too, Mud-boy?'

They stood together at the entrance to the walled city. Holly saw Artemis look fleetingly at her, and she tried hard to look like she knew what in reincarnation she was doing – even though she'd lost any idea she'd had about the time she'd crashed through a wall of rock, ten thousand leagues under the sea with a Leviathan tailing her ship and a Mud-boy in the passenger's seat.

She counted mentally to three.

Holly expected the next seconds to involve flying through the air (again), splashing around in that Artic-temperature water (again) and being on the receiving end of a few, well-aimed sarcastic comment on Artemis's behalf (most definitely again).

So when they passed through unscathed, Holly breathed a sigh of relief – and then promptly inspired it again as a gasp.

What could only be an ivory tower rose before them, reminiscent of those built on the corners of medieval keeps. The staircase clung to the smooth surface of the tower, spiralling around and upward into the sky. Sometimes it appeared to widen and level out into a platform. A little further onward, however, it would slope anew, again running circles around the tower. The summit, if there indeed was one, was shrouded by the mist. Holly presumed that that was where they would find the last Stone – but knowing the Druids, this enigmatic structure this could just as easily be some sort of amusement built by the novices in their spare time.

It gleamed with magic in Holly's Sight. Shades of blue and purple she could never have imagined clung to the walls. Flashes of orange-gold sometimes appeared through the veil of mist, before being just as inexplicably swallowed back up by it. Every nerve inside her tensed up in anticipation, and her blood began to rush a little faster. She still couldn't see the top – only a halo of light that could just as well be an illusion as another source of magic.

'Are you going to gape at it all day – or night, whatever this is – or start climbing?'

Artemis's comment snapped Holly out of her riviere. They began climbing.

Eventually, Holly began to notice something about the steps. Namely that whoever had been working on them had evidentially gotten bored of the task rather quickly. The first flight of stairs was fine – each step was uniform height and width. As they grew steadily higher, however, the steps became misshapen. Some became more trapezoidal than rectangular, while others crumbled underfoot and more were barely even ledges, let alone stairs in their own right. Holly didn't dare to be careless – a quick glance over the edge kept her mind from wandering too far, even if their constant circling was making her dizzy.

Eventually – when the view below them became nauseating rather than scenic – Holly gave up looking how far they had come from the ground, and kept her gaze fixed on the next step or on Artemis's back depending on their pace (a patronising noise or two every time the latter occurred would quickly restore the view back to the former).

An hour and a half passed until the first platform.

Holly slumped onto the wall, keeping her back flat against it. Normally, she would have perched on the edge and faced the drop with defiance – just to make Artemis edgy – but she about fifteen minutes previous, she had began to get a strange feeling that the tower was swaying. That – combined with their distance from the earth – was enough to discourage her from doing anything overly stupid.

Artemis, despite the rapid rising and falling of his chest, was still standing, looking at something on the wall. At the same moment she opened her mouth to ask him about it, something behind him caught her eye. A sparkling shimmer seemed to bar the way onto the next flight of stairs.

A force field. Brilliant.

Before long, when Artemis still hadn't sat down, Holly found the energy to move enough to see what he was looking at. Standing on an elegant little plinth (not unlike the ones inside the caves below Nika) was a large golden goblet. The bowl was deep and wide, studded with obsidian. The base was studded with the same pattern, edges lined with silver. Inside shone a blood red liquid – half empty or half full, which ever way you wanted to look at it.

'Do you think they're providing refreshments?'

Holly laughed. 'Not likely – the Druids aren't that hospitable. I'm assuming this binds us to the Three Lores of Engagement.'

'Which are?' prompted Artemis.

'All who drink must complete the tasks alive, before sunset, and without turning back.'

'The tasks?'

'Apparently.'

Holly wrapped her hand around the thick stem of the chalice and swallowed a mouthful. It was like drinking liquid lava – there was no taste, only a coursing trail of fire from her tongue straight down her throat. Trying hard not to choke, Holly blew out the heat in one large breath then gulped in as much of the cold air as she could, all while attempting not to look to alarmed.

Artemis was watching her with amusement. She flung the goblet towards him.

'It's all right –' Keeping her features sincere and waited for him to sip. '– for something that's probably been sitting here for a thousand years or so.'

Artemis swallowed and scowled, replacing the goblet back onto its miniature platform. Immediately, the shining wall of air stopped shining and settled into a less vibrant spectrum.

'That tasted ominously like alcohol.' Artemis remarked as they leaned against the wall of the tower, half trying to catch their breath and half trying to swallow the burning sensation in the backs of their mouths.

Holly shook her head, taking another two breaths of air before answering. 'I still have my magic.'

She reached into her boot and withdrew her ornate knife, and proceeded to snick her tip of her index finger on the blade. A single bead of blood welled from the wound, and Holly waited for it to take on a bluish sheen before wiping it away. He held out her hand for Artemis to examine – her fingertip was unblemished.

'See?' Holly said, smirking. 'Do you trust me now?'

'Of course,' Artemis replied, expressionless. 'Just not behind the helm of an air or water craft.'

'Actually, now I think about it, I aced the Academy exams for marksmanship, as well as aviation,' warned Holly, waving her knife in front of her. Artemis stared at the light playing off it, not even reacting to her remark.

'What? Are you going to gape all day – or night, whatever this is – or start climbing?'

'Day.'

'What?'

'It's day.'

Holly looked to the horizon, where the sun had just begun to rise.

It definitely wasn't her imagination. The quality of the craftsmanship was severely diminishing as they climbed – the riser and tread of each stair varied greatly between each and the margin between the wall of the tower and the open air did too. The sandstone continued to crumble away when she misjudged her step, and once Artemis had nearly slipped off the edge. After that, they'd kept both kept close to the wall, and always kept one hand in contact with it – not that there would be anything to hold onto if they did happen to overbalance.

Holly felt her hand brush Artemis's – again. As their strides became disjointed, and whatever energy they had left began to fade, it had happened more often. The first few times, Artemis had muttered sorry, and Holly had echoed, but now it was reassuring. She was concentrating so hard on getting her feet to hit the stone that she probably wouldn't have noticed if Artemis had disappeared into thin air (which was more than likely, should he fall).

After another hour or about – Holly wasn't counting anymore – the next platform appeared. This time, Holly didn't bother looking for the object of interest to them here. Once she'd ascertained that there was indeed another force field separating them from their goal, she let her legs buckle beneath her and leant her head against the cold stone.

Beside her, Artemis reclined more elegantly. Her eyelids drooped as she watched him close his eyes in an attempt at a brief respite. Despite herself, Holly did the same.

When Artemis's violent shake woke her, Holly realised she must have fallen asleep. She opened her eyes and met Artemis's cool blue gaze. She pushed him aside as she drew her knees to her chest and laid her head on them. After a moment or two, she finally regained the will to live and decided she should get up again.

'Any idea what we do here?' she asked, levering herself to her feet. She looked around, intent on answering her own question.

From the wall of the tower, hung a silver bell. A thin chain hanging down from the striker swayed gently in the breeze, but the bell didn't ring. Holly tapped it lightly, and there was a faint chiming.

Another bell – from somewhere inside the tower maybe – rang once, then twice, twice again quickly and once again. Holly blinked, and rang the silver bell again. The pattern resounded again from inside – ding … ding, ding … ding-ding ding …

Artemis reached over her shoulder and rang four times. The invisible bells responded in their previous fashion, but the force field didn't waver.

_Makes sense_, Holly reasoned to herself, _One, two, three, four. But, somehow, I don't think that it's going to be that simple._

The force field flickered, but didn't disappear.

'I didn't think it would be that simple,' Artemis said in a tone that on anyone else could be described as sullen. He tried a few more times – numbers which followed a pattern outside Holly's comprehension. Nothing happened.

Soon Artemis stopped tapping out sequences and started thinking in silence. Holly herself rang out a few random tunes while he thought, and listened to the same response each time.

In the time following that, Artemis decided on, explained, tried and rejected several ideas (including one that was based on a rather complicated equation that convinced Holly he was making most of it up). When he suggested something to do with the universal value of pi, she stopped listening and started thinking of her own theories.

She came to the conclusion that they were doing something wrong. (No? Really?) They weren't just getting the wrong answer, but _going_ about getting it wrongly as well. She'd gotten the same feeling when she'd tried to complete a series of lateral thinking exercises in one of the theory units in the Academy. The only piece of advice her instructor had offered was that she was looking at the problem the wrong way. Although, she couldn't entirely _see_ this problem. But she _could_ hear it…

'Are we listening to the wrong parts? Should we be concentrating on the pauses and not the sound?'

Artemis raised a sceptical eyebrow. 'What use would that be? Music is made from the notes played by the musician, not the rests in the piece itself.'

Holly rolled her eyes in response to this, grumbled something unprintable about his heritage under her breath and continued to stare moodily out at the horizon. A second later, she heard Artemis's sharp intake of breath.

Her turn to raise an eyebrow.

'As it turns out,' Artemis said, looking almost sheepish, 'your theory may have some sustenance.'

Holly grinned, happy at being right – and knowing that was as close Artemis would ever come to admitting it – even if she didn't know what she was right about.

'Separating the beats into measures, they become one, one-one, two-one. Or, one, eleven, twenty one.'

'Thirty one?' She raised the other eyebrow now. 'Isn't that a lot of bells?'

Artemis shrugged. 'We have time.'

So, they rang the bell. Thirty one times. Still nothing. In her mind, she turned the theory over and over, trying to 'look' at it in another way. From a different angle.

'One-one…two-ones…' she heard Artemis mutter, scratching something into the stone in front of him with her ornate knife. Suddenly, he sat up straight, his vampiric grin back in place. Holly watched, her breath caught, as he struck the chimes.

_Ding…ding-ding…ding…ding… _

The force field shimmered and then was gone.

The immaterial bells sounded the completed pattern.

_Ding._

_Ding, ding._

_Ding-ding, ding._

_Ding, ding-ding, ding, ding._

Each line described the first, Holly realised now.

One.

One one.

Two ones.

One two, one one.

'Now who's the genius, Captain?'

Holly rolled her eyes again, and gave a mock bow. Artemis muttered something about having to deal with the insolence of his subjects. Holly muttered something equally coherent about the bathing habits of medieval kings and then compared them to those of Irish masterminds. Artemis bowed in acknowledgement, and then made a comment about elves and mud baths. Holly then ran out of witty things to mutter under her breath and decided that she would be the bigger person and finally walk away. But only after punching Artemis.

Two thousand, two hundred and twenty two (amazing how these things work out, isn't it?) steps later, they stood in front of the next task.

The plinth was in it's customary position, to the side, away from the edge and its view (which Holly was starting to get very tired of). She'd thought about it (she'd had a lot of time to do so) and she'd decided she'd rather go back to Traffic (and Grub's whining) than lay eyes on it ever again (ever).

She turned her attention back to the platform. Five dice – one red, one blue, one green, one grey and one violet – were scattered over the surface of the pedestal. With a(nother) bell.

'Symbolic,' remarked Artemis from behind her, plucking one from the stone and twirling it around to examine every face. Holly raised an eyebrow in silent question. He gestured toward the five dice, his eyebrows slanting downward. 'Each colour represents an element – fire, water, earth, air and spirit.'

Holly shrugged, a little stoic and uncaring after so much climbing. She grabbed the dice from Artemis's hand, and, taking up the other four in one fluid motion, rolled all of them at once.

She looked at the result. Two, five, one, three, five.

After a second of silence, Artemis reached over and rang the bell beside the five dice. As the soft, melodious note faded away, a fleck of red floated down into Holly's vision.

_Roses. _Ten of them, actually. Holly wondered what roses had to do with dice.

She held one of the roses up to the light experimentally. They looked natural enough – even a bit on the small side. Holly looked up. Above her, a maze of matted vines clung to the ceiling. On them, in various stages of maturity, grew a myriad of roses and buds.

'Figured it out yet?' Holly asked, pelting Artemis with the rose she was holding.

'Do you know the odds of my guessing the pattern from one roll?' he caught it in mid-air, and then let it drift through his fingers onto the sandstone floor.

Holly narrowed her eyes to slits, smirking widely. 'Do _you_? Know the odds?'

'Of course,' he replied, with the same expression.

Holly rolled her eyes, and then the dice.

Three, five, two, four, one.

After Artemis rang the bell a second time, another six roses detangled themselves from the ceiling, and floated, with unnatural weightlessness, into Holly's hands. Placing them next to the dice, she looked inquiringly at Artemis. He was staring at the dice, frowning.

'How does six relate to the integers one, two, three, four and five?'

Holly grinned, giving him a sideward glance.

'It's the next number.'

Artemis brushed the roses, which had now disintegrated into petals, onto the floor. Some were caught in a breeze and whisked off the landing and into the open air below them. Holly watched them disappear into the mist below, before looking back to the plinth. Artemis had rolled again.

Four, three, six, one, five.

This time, Artemis waited a moment, before ringing the bell twice. Holly waited, unbreathing, until another six roses floated down onto the platform. Shrugging, she scooped up the dice again, and rolled.

Two, one, one, six, four, two.

The force field hummed.

Again, Artemis reached over and rang the bell.

A second passed. And another. And a few more. The silence of movement as well as sound stretched onward indefinitely, until Holly looked up to the ceiling, and blew smoke into the chilly air, as if that provided incentive for the buds to fall. They didn't. A wisp of mist tangled itself around the column of the platform.

Exchanging a sceptical look with Artemis, Holly tried for a lighter tone. 'Maybe their rose-faller-thing is out of action…'

Artemis raised an eyebrow back at her. 'Fairy magic or human mechanics – same thing in the end, isn't it?'

Holly snorted, but didn't answer, choosing instead to roll once more.

Five, five, three, two, six.

While Artemis contemplated the die, Holly plucked the petals from the cool, damp sandstone floor and flung them out into the open space, watching them fall until she could no longer track their progress through the shrouding fog. As she watched the last red fleck merge into grey, Holly wondered why the unknowable creators of this never ending nightmare had chosen roses to represent the answers.

Apparently, Artemis had given up just after that thought, because more roses were being scattered at her feet. She nudged the ten of them off the edge with the toe of her boot. They made their decent leisurely down to join their comrades.

'Why…' Holly realised she'd spoken aloud when Artemis began looking at her strangely. She amended her musings. 'Why roses? Any flower would do, wouldn't it?'

Artemis thought on it for a moment – his eyebrows locked together, his hand suspended in mid-throw. Holly was just about to suggest that he might hurt himself when his face softened. He smiled and let go of the dice. They dropped with a dull 'thunk' onto the surface of the platform.

'Any flower _would_ do, actually.'

Holly leaned over his shoulder to read the roll, sneaking glances at his smug expression. Six, four, three, three, two.

She shook her head. 'I still don't get it.'

Artemis's smirk intensified. 'To the contrary, you revealed the answer.'

'What?'

He rang the bell four times, and, to Holly's non-surprise, the force field flickered once and died. She closed her eyes for a moment, pursed her lips, and breathed out audibly through her nose. Opening her eyes to stare Artemis down, Holly phrased her next question with careful eloquence.

'_How the hell did_ _you_ _do_ _that_?'

Artemis didn't answer, rather, his attention was fixed on the distant horizon. Holly stared absently until she noticed the spiral of disjointed petals rising up to the heavy clouds on an invisible thermal – all of them completely white.

Holly reached out to touch one of the buds, but a rush of wind deflected her hand. She tried again with the same result. Leaned out as far as she dared, she looked up to where the torrent twirled and twisted up to the eventual pinnacle of the tower.

'Petals around the rose.' Holly's attention snapped back onto Artemis. He seemed to be satisfied – obviously what he had just said made sense to him. Somehow. 'Though – as you suggested – any flower would do.'

Holly rolled her eyes. 'That was sufficiently vague.' She shot across a sour smirk. 'Though, it's precisely what I expect of you.'

'If the centre of the dice was the rose,' Artemis continued blithely, probably ignoring her, 'then the petals surrounding that rose would be the remaining dots.

'Only five, three and one have the centre of the rose, so only those can support petals.' He paused, giving Holly time to wonder if he was a little crazy. Dice had never spouted petals…not that she knew of anyway.

'One has no dots surrounding it, so it's total of petals is zero. Discounting the centre dots that represent the rose, five is worth four and three is worth two. Adding their values gives the petals around the rose.' Artemis paused again. 'Or any other angiosperm of your choosing.'

'Uh-huh.' Holly rolled the dice between her fingers absently. 'Sure.'

'Uh-huh?' He sounded unconvinced of her comprehension.

She snapped two of the dice together violently. 'Three had two petals and five had four petals, because each of the middle dots it a rose.'

She set the cubes back in formation, and looked up in time to see Artemis smirk.

'Uh-huh. Sure.'

She punched him in the stomach.


	10. Feline Flight

**Chapter 9**

Holly wished the stairs would end. The endless stream of steps was begging to grind on her nerves. Only a little, of course. But still.

Of course, only in retrospect can you tell how good you've got something. Little was she to know that when the stairs were finally gone, Holly would be wishing they were back.

She tried massaging some of the tension out of her hands. They were so stiff and cold that she felt like someone had coated them liquid nitrogen. They felt that brittle too – as if they'd snap if she moved them too much.

'D'arvit!'

'Language,' muttered Artemis from behind her.

She placed one hand back onto the wall, silently cursing. She was pitched so far forward, she felt like her grip on the wall was the only thing keeping her from falling onto the stairs. Although Artemis assured her otherwise, Holly was convinced they were scaling a vertical staircase, not an angulated one.

One thing she knew no one could argue, however, was that her whole lower body was going to ache for hours when she finally sat down again. Providing she ever got the chance to.

Holly made the next five minutes of the climb with her eyes opened only slightly, her view of the steps obscured by her eyelashes. It was rather hard to keep steady – she had to balance herself carefully with her other hand – but it was a relief not to have to see a never ending path of stairs forever stretched out before her. Soon, her eyes closed almost completely.

Which explains why, about ten seconds later, she smacked her forehead.

For a moment, she just blinked torpidly at the solid wall before her, wondering why it was there. Slowly, she realised that she was eye to eye with a panther. It took her a moment, but then she realised she was staring at an engraving in the wall.

Twin large-cats, surprisingly lifelike. Possibly "guardians" drawn by superstitious Druids, much like the lions or gargoyles which were commonly erected at the entrances of large estates in the human world. Dark obsidian had been fashioned as their eyes and claws. Then she shook her vision clear of the blue-black blotches clouding it, and stepped back.

The extravagantly carved sandstone wall blocked their passage forward. Holly looked sideways, toward the main bulk of the tower, and saw that there was an entrance carved through the sandstone, edged in a border that matched the extravagance of the wall.

Holly carefully edged inside, half expecting the floor to give way beneath her and to be sent down through the innards of the tower to a death consisting of millions of broken bones and possibly a crushed skull.

So, needless to say, when the floor supported her whole weight, she was relieved, if feeling a degree foolish.

It was dark. The only light came from the doorway. The walls to her other side and behind her were solid sandstone, while in front of her was yet another staircase.

The stairs were enclosed on both sides by the tower. In contrast to the outer walls, the ones inside were detailed with myriads carvings. Carvings of birds. All genera were represented – from the large male peafowl with their royal tails right down to the bleak female sparrows – each single eye studded by a gemstone of different hue.

Holly could see where this sole staircase ended – in a fleck of yellow-white light above and beyond her. The metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel. She leapt onto the first step – it was almost waist high – and began to walk towards it.

Suddenly, the chamber blackened, and Holly twisted her head to face the entrance. Artemis stood on the threshold, silhouetted against the light. As she walked forward, Holly extended her hand to him to help him clear the step. To her immense surprise, he took it.

'Suppose we'd better to get used to it…' Holly murmured, glad her voice held some semblance of sarcasm.

When they emerged into the light, it was blinding – but it was not bright. The whole sky, previously a dull grey blanket, had been dyed blood-red. Holly looked over to where a crimson orb was disappearing below the horizon in an inauspicious imitation of sunset.

Holly's LEPrecon trained mind autonomously scanned the new environment. Her observations were made quickly, knowing their time was running out.

The platform wasn't walled. (Holly shot a glance over the edge, but stepped back quickly – the ridge extended out past the edge of the spirals of stair below it, letting her gaze fall directly onto the mist below. It was a sickening drop. Even looking at it made her nauseous, and she had cured herself of acrophobia decades ago.)

The recurring plinth that had appeared on every landing had not failed to do so on this one. (It was guarded by life-sized replicas of feline cats – jaguars or panthers. The eyes of these carvings, like those on the wall outside the last staircase, shone black – obsidian.)

A thin rod of stone rose from the main body of the plinth, and on it balanced the Stone. (It radiating gold in Holly's Sight. Holly wondered how it survived any windstorms that occurred this high up – it was balanced precariously on the pinnacle, and didn't look very stable. She wondered what protected it – surely it wasn't going to be this easy.)

As Holly reached out to take the Stone, two things occurred in succession.

The first was that the stairwell behind them dissolved into the sandstone, with the ominous sound of rock grinding against the rock. Now, that in itself would constitute panic – especially since Holly's wings were currently inoperable. But that happening was minor compared to what had just occurred _in front _of her.

Which was that the two stone statues were not longer statues.

Actually, they were very much alive.

_D'arvit._

Holly didn't have time to react – they had her sprawled on her back before she could even take a breath to prepare to defend herself. One of them collided with her ribcage, cracking something. Holly slid out from under the muscled form, blue sparks filling her chest.

Beside her, she saw Artemis fall. She saw red – literally and metaphorically. Without thinking, Holly shoved her consciousness against the minds of the wildcats, and dimly, she recognised their retreat back into their stone counterparts.

As soon as their threat was minimized, Holly's mind automatically switched priorities. She pulled Artemis close to her, and held her ear to his mouth. After a few gasping breaths assured her he wasn't suffering from magical shock, she closed her palm around the wound in his shoulder, where the feline had gauged him. In a second, her hand was coated with sticky blood, but mixed in with the red was blue.

_Heal._

A frantic rush of blue sparks rushed from her fingertips into the wound. Neither the blood nor her magic stopped flowing. The wound bled until Holly couldn't feel her own magic from behind the red-gold tint the blood gave off in her Sight. More worrying still, Holly couldn't stop the flow of magic. Trying to hold her will against it was as useless as trying swimming against the tide – she felt that even attempting it would cause her to drown.

Her magic was running dry – and the wound hadn't closed. Why, she hadn't the faintest idea. She didn't even bother looking to Artemis for an explanation – she tore the seam of his jacket, ripping off a length of material to tie around the lesion. She felt him flinch as she tightened it to constrict the flow. Once the blood had stopped flowing freely, Holly ruined more of Artemis's jacket creating another make-shift bandage to hold the first in place.

'Do you have any idea how much an Armani suit retails for?'

'Just concentrate on breathing.'

Now certain that Artemis hadn't been overtly damaged by his encounter, Holly took to observing their situation. Her prognosis wasn't encouraging. Her Neutrino was next to useless, as were her wings – both rendered inoperable by the dead zone enveloping the tower. One member of her team was already injured, possibly suffering from blood loss. The wildcats, who had retreated to guard the plinth housing the final Stone, seemed to be physically and magically stronger than her.

Holly looked toward the wildcats. They looked sedate enough, but the fire in their eyes looked volatile, prone to erupting into an inferno at slightest provocation. And, more than that, she couldn't help but think that Artemis's injury was a precursor – a warning. That the next blow wouldn't be so lenient. That the next blow would be fatal.

Artemis was searching through her pack. She had no idea what he was looking for. Everything in there had come directly from the Ops Booth, which meant that it was crammed full of technology, which meant it was useless. At her glare, he muttered something about escape tactics. Well, escape tactics were great – but before they could attempt whatever insanity Artemis came up with, they had to stay alive long enough for him to come up with it.

Holly looked back towards the wildcats. They were getting restless, shifting inside their stone selves, but didn't look as if they would attack. She guessed that they didn't move so long as the Stone wasn't targeted. Magic was specific about those sorts of things.

She could feel her magic – what precious little she had left of it – weakening in the waning sunlight. She felt around for the faint, thin tendrils of magic still floating beneath her consciousness, slowly pulling them together until she could reach if she needed it. Not that if either of them was injured, there would be enough to heal anything other than a minor laceration. Gods, there was barely enough for her to preform the _mesmer _–

– and then Holly had an idea of her own.

Carefully, she stepped forward, trying to keep her mind clear of intention. She had the weird feeling that these eldritch creatures could read her mind – or at least read it enough to decide whether or not she was going to make a grab for the Stone. Her eyes fixed firmly on theirs, she moved with exaggerated slowness. She couldn't force their attack too early – she had to be close enough.

She could feel Artemis's gaze on her from behind, and she hoped whatever plan he had of escaping was ready and formulated and not totally insane. Then she stopped thinking – this was no time for thought.

As she slipped her hand inconspicuously down onto the hilt of her ceremonial knife, she tried to still her mind – to force it to react only on instinct without conscious intervention. Holly didn't like being out of control, but she forced herself to let go.

She was getting close now, and she could feel the change in them. Their eyes both began to sharpen onto her and their muscles tensed, making the thick black pelt ripple with red light. They shifted a little, and waited. Holly took another step forward.

She felt rather than saw them move for her. She shielded.

It was over in a second. She saw the quick flash of their obsidian claws, and she released the thread of magic into the tapestry of their minds. _Mesmer, _a mess of confusion. It worked – they hesitated, both simultaneously.

For a moment, Holly was connected to their minds, and saw herself, then the vision was lost in white static.

She felt her hand move automatically, pulling her knife free of its sheath. Instinct sought out the pulsing vein of one of the wildcats, and she threw herself onto it, pushing the blade in until it sank down to the hilt.

Hot, wet, sticky blood coated her arms, and Holly wondered if she hit the jugular. That brought her to her senses enough for her to realise that her spine was pressed into the concrete floor, and she was facing the sky, even if she couldn't see it through the red glare from the sun. That wasn't the best position to be in, not with a second assailant.

The wind had been knocked from her and she tried gasping for breath, but nothing came. There was an enormous weight over her chest – collapsing her lungs, starving her of the air she desperately tried to get at. She struggled to get her arms under her, then struggled to push the dark, black mass of her so she could stand and breathe. After the first rasping inhalation, she came fully to her senses and wrenched the knife from the hide of the wildcat's corpse.

Then the world moved again, collapsing into a blur of colours. Holly thought she'd fainted, and then she realised the second wildcat's confusion had cleared and it was attacking her. She tried to turn, but the world kept moving out of her reach. She clutched the knife tight, knowing that if anything could save her from those claws, those teeth – if anything could save her it would be her knife.

She felt an impact on her skull, and the first, insensible thought she had was that she didn't need concussion, not when she had no magic left. Her vision cleared as her mind recovered from the blow, and let her see that she was slumped against the Stone's plinth – maybe ten centimetres from what she needed to end this.

Still, she couldn't move. She turned her head to see the dark shadow of the wildcat moving toward her, confident now that she was his prey and not the other way around. She also saw that there was blood on the stone near her head, and that it was hers. She lifted a hand to her forehead, and it came away with liquid red and granules of the crust of dried blood already there.

It leapt at her (again? Had it tried before?). Holly felt the knife in her hand, and became conscious of the fact it was pointing toward the sky. As the dark shape knocked the wind from her a second time, she forced her tired muscles to push her blade into its heart, its lungs, its stomach – anywhere, anywhere it could reach.

The knife made contact – Holly knew because it twisted her wrists back onto her forearms, and it _hurt. _She yelled out, and was shocked to realise that her voice was a single melded cry of _mesmer._ A mind-link formed within it to join herself and the feline eldritchAgain, at her wordless command, the wildcat faltered –

– and the world went totally, completely, unexplainably white.

Holly felt the pressure from the cat's body about to snap her hands from her arms, and then she felt it lift from her, thrown back as if propelled by an explosion. Her breath returned to her in a rush, and Holly grasped desperately for something to pull herself up with. Finding the ledge of the platform, she pulled herself around and upright. Though half-open eyes, she saw something shining in her blurred vision. She was captivated by it for a moment –

– and realised it was the Stone.

Movement flashed in the corner of her eye. In one instinctive motion, Holly snatched the Stone from its pinnacle and evaded as best she could. A wave of pain erupted from her skull – she hadn't gotten out of that unscathed. Abruptly, her vision spiralled, and she fell backwards. Away from the plinth – perhaps towards the claws of the wildcat… or even into the open air …

In the second it took for the world to right itself, Holly's breath caught in her throat. Then, seconds later – as the pain from her various injuries came sharply in focus – she realised that her hand was closed over Artemis's arm, and began to breathe again.

While she concentrated on not fainting, she vaguely recognised that Artemis was tying something around her waist. Automatically, she withdrew her hand to see what it was – her Moonbelt? – while her eyes sought the wildcat in the misty landscape.

She glimpsed its mordant form in the mist-shadows cast by the sun, which was slipping further below the horizon every second she looked. The cat seemed reluctant now, cautious. She felt the tug of its mind on hers.

Suddenly, she became aware of her consciousness spinning again, and this time she knew it had nothing to do with the blood pouring down her forehead like sweat. This time it was because the Stone had overcome her natural floodgates, and was channelling its power into her – a torrent of magic collapsing into her mind.

She reach her hand out to Artemis's again, for two reasons. The first was that she needed someone else for the Stone to bond to so it didn't overwhelm her. The second reason she wouldn't acknowledge, even to herself. She held tighter as the _mesmer_ keeping the wildcat from attacking them suddenly became very much unstable.

_It was breaking._

As Artemis's consciousness split the flow of power coming from the diamond, Holly felt her own do the same and bit back a groan. She could feel the link between her and the feline beginning to fray. What little defence she had left was breaking.

_Breaking…_

She looked at Artemis for a way out – one of his miraculous schemes. He evaded her gaze, staring instead down past the tower's edge. Holly looked from the severe drop to the Mud-teen, and felt her eyes widen as it occurred to her what he was silently suggesting. He wanted them to jump… where? To a different death?

_Breaking…_

'The dead zone–' Artemis's explanation faltered as he studied her wings. 'If we are able to clear the dead zone–' He paused again, fooling about with the wiring directly from the control panel. Her wings were a mess, and the covering plate must have come loose somewhere. Foaly would have a fit.

_Breaking…_

Holly looked out over the edge of the tower, to where she imagined the imaginary line between the technological world and the Druid's powerless one might be. It was impossible to tell where the shoreline was under the thick layer of mist obscuring the ground, but Holly knew they'd be cutting it fine.

_Breaking._

Artemis seemed satisfied now, because he was staring at her, his expression unreadable. She considered the fall one last time – as the wildcat stirred again behind them – and nodded.

_Breaking._

They stepped forward so that the air opened beneath them, and Holly felt as if this really was the edge of the world, and they were jumping into nothing. She took as deep a breath as she could manage, and exhaled it as a sigh. Beside her, she heard Artemis begin a countdown. She could barely hear it over the rushing of blood in her ears.

_Breaking –_

'Three…'

– _breaking –_

'Two…'

– _breaking –_

'One…'

– _breaking –_

'Now!'

_Broken_.


End file.
